prevent a certain note of sadness entering into
our farewell. Were Bright here to-day reading
our newspapers what would he say? His dreams
have not yet come true. Retrenchment? I dare
not mention the amount of last year's estimates.
Peace? O'er the restless waves of what inland sea
or mighty ocean does peace securely spread her
wings? And as for the great Republic of the West,
she has travelled far along a very different path
from the one that Bright's glowing fancy painted
for her. What to-day are the prospects of humanity?
What chances has she? This is an age which takes
upon itself to sneer at theology, and no doubt if a
theology becomes incredible, there is an end to
it; but theology, alone of the subjects which claim
the grave attention of mortals, does at all events
proffer an answer to this searching question. But
although the devil is not dead, as the cheerful
optimist in Charles Reade's Cloister and the Hearth
used to go about declaring he was-though the
devil is not dead, there is no reason why we should
lose courage. The world, for all we know, may yet
be in the nursery. I am sure its inmates are childish
enough to afford good grounds for that belief.
John Bright's thought, all his thoughts and all
his hopes, and all his dreams, though necessarily
limited in their range and, it may well be, inade-
quate in their scope, were tinged with the glory
that comes streaming from the Master Light,
whom we may address in the inspired language of
the
great poet dear to Bright himself, Wordsworth:

Uphold us-cherish-and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal silence: truths that wake,

To perish never.

COBDEN1

(The Nation, January 1919)

R. HOBSON begins this interesting, illuminating, though of necessity (con

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sidering the ravaged times in which we live) most melancholy book, with an image, so pat and yet so fanciful, as at once to set me off thinking, on my own account, almost before I had begun to read. He introduces his subject by saying, "The process of settlement' to which the reputation of a great public man is subjected after he has passed away, is almost inevitably attended by grave misrepresentations.'" It was this use of the word "settlement" that played the mischief with my fancy. The "settlement" and simile which Mr. Hobson had in mind when he penned his opening sentence was not, of course, the kind of settlement which a man sometimes makes on his marriage, or that other kind that determines in what parish workhouse he is doomed to die, but the sort of settlement which ensues where the soil, which has been made the foundation of a building, gives way and sinks, either under the weight of the super-imposed structure, or on account of some shifting of the sands below.

It is, indeed, a striking simile which works devastation all around. Mr. Cobden's settlement

1 Richard Cobden, the International Man. By J. A. Hobson (Fisher Unwin).

is not so obvious as that which has befallen many of his distinguished contemporaries in politics, literature, philosophy, and art. “Creeds change, rites pass. No altar standeth whole." It is not only death that makes the difference, though death does make a mighty difference, altering, almost at once, the "point of view." No! it is the passage of time and the course of events which, day by day, with the moving hand of the dial, and the things that happen, reduce dead men's reputations by antiquating the arguments they were never weary of employing, by falsifying their most confident predictions, and, most of all, perhaps, by opening up new markets, not only for goods and manufactures, but for thought and speculation, and thus diverting the old routes along which these dead men were not only content but compelled to travel.

Settlement or no settlement, Cobden has proved himself in these mutable days to be "a good stayer." He was born one hundred and fourteen years ago. He died in 1865. Lord Morley has written (in 1881) his life in two volumes, and now in 1919 appears a book all about him, tingling with interest and vitality. This is a long spell for a "public man." What in the meantime has become of his ancient enemy, Lord Palmerston, who in 1857, when flushed with the glories of the Chinese War and the Crimean War, not only flouted "Cobden, Bright and Co." at the polls, but, so it was confidently predicted, had driven those pests out of public life? In the following year, however, "Cobden, Bright and Co." appeared in Parliament, and, in Cobden's case,

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unopposed. We are all much too apt to mistake incidents for events.

This "study" of Mr. Hobson's is wholly concerned, as its sub-title indicates, with Cobden's Foreign Policy (best described as "anti-Palmerston") with his far-reaching conceptions of international relationships, with his hatred of Foreign Office traditions, with his doctrine of "non-intervention," and with his projects for avoiding war altogether or rendering it as difficult as possible.

Of the triumphant Cobden, the Free Trader, and successful Anti-Corn-Law agitator, we hear not a word, except an occasional complaint from Cobden himself that the agitation succeeded so well as to have exhausted all the courage and initiative of Manchester. I infer from Mr. Hobson's silence on the subject of Free Trade that he is of opinion that, though Tariff Reform is installed in Downing Street, yet as ministers are pledged to leave food and the raw materials of British industries untaxed, a Tariff Reform like that is as little likely to threaten the health of our economics as can a married clergy ever really endanger our Protestant Establishment. Otherwise, I do not think Mr. Hobson could have been induced, notwithstanding his sub-title, to have held his peace throughout four hundred pages.

Cobden expounded his Foreign Policy again and again during the thirties, the forties, and the fifties in pamphlets, which had a wide circulation, and produced at the time a profound educational effect, not only on the minds of the middle classes and the reading artisan, but also

on those of their children, who, though they may not have read these pamphlets for themselves, had to listen to their substance related to them by parental lips at the family board. Cobden was not only one of the most persuasive speakers to a town-bred audience that ever lived, but he was also a most persuasive writer, and his readers were numerous and receptive. Like somebody's whisky, he had a "gran' grip o' the watter " -e.g., I derive my detestation of Palmerston and of all the ways of that double-dealing man from Cobden's pamphlets, though they only reached me at second-hand.

Cobden's methods were thus more instructive than Bright's, and ever in the later days of his "Anti-Palmerston" campaign he had a striking success as a teacher. His "class" may not have been composed of such "influential" persons as Delane's in the Times, whose readers then included everybody in receipt of the taxpayer's money, nor could Cobden appear every morning on the breakfast table; but for all that he was a formidable rival even to the Times, and as Time and Reason have, oftener than not, shown themselves, to have been on his side, Cobden has struggled out of the fray, leaving less of his wool on the hedges than any other English politician, editor, or publicist of his day and generation.

Teachers of their fellow men can never expect to be popular anywhere, and least of all in England, where to be didactic is to be damned, but as good teachers seldom aim at popularity they need not grumble if they miss it.

Cobden was too bent on immediate persuasion