ever to be offensively didactic. Yet in his hearty and noble detestation of Palmerston's wars and ways he incurred great unpopularity by using language about England that went far to support the allegation, in itself untrue, that he was one of those men who, in Chatham's language, had devoured the strange herb which makes men forget their native country. For example, he writes:

"We shall do no good until we can bring home to the conviction and consciences of men the fact that, as in the slave trade, we had surpassed in guilt the whole world, so in foreign wars we have been the most aggressive, quarrelsome, warlike and bloody nation under the sun (p. 90). Again: "I wish we had a map, with a red spot printed upon those places by land and sea where we have fought battles since 1688. It would be seen at a glance that we have (unlike any other nation under the sun), been fighting foreign enemies upon every part of the earth's surface, excepting our own territory-thus showing that we have been the most warlike and aggressive people that ever existed" (p. 89).

This is a jaundiced view to take of our old friend the "Weary Titan," groaning along under the too vast orb of his fate. No one can accuse England of treating war as her main industry, and as for being more bloody, more aggressive, and more quarrelsome than any other nation, that hardly seems likely. But, as Cobden candidly admitted, Palmerston had spoiled his temper-so irritated him as almost to force him into taking up an attitude towards war which his general doctrine of non-intervention in no way demanded. Cobden, though no doubt he hated war, as usually waged, more than do most Christians, was no Quaker. What do we find him writing to his Northern friend, Charles Sumner, during the American Civil War? "It is nothing but your great power that has kept

the hands of Europe off you." A saying only too true, as we all know to our shame, but how much is involved in its truth!

Cobden sought peace, as President Wilson is doing, through a League of Nations. Before our Russian War began he wrote: "I should appeal not only to Germany, but to all the States, small as well as great, on the Continent, for such a union as would prevent the possibility of any act of hostility from a common enemy."

So long ago as 1849 (before President Wilson was born), Cobden attended a Peace Congress in Paris, which set itself seriously to consider how best to promote the cause of Universal Peace. France, Germany, Belgium, England, and the United States were represented by men at least as eminent as any of those who are to-day making it impossible to get a bed in Paris. Victor Hugo, France incarnate, the mighty lord "of human tears," was its President. M. de Girardin, the most famous editor in Europe, Lamartine, who was once, at all events, a name to conjure with, Chevalier, Say, and Bastiat, political economists of renown, and many others, unanimously recommended the friends of peace to prepare public opinion in their respective countries for the formation of a Congress of Nations, to revise the existing International Law, and to constitute a High Tribunal for the decision of controversies among nations. In support of their objects the Congress, acting, I am sure, in all good faith and sincerity, called to their aid" the representatives of the Press, so potent to diffuse truth, and also all ministers of religion, whose holy office it is to encourage

goodwill among men." This in August, 1849! What mockery it now sounds! The coup d'état, the Italian War; the Chinese War; the Crimean War; the Battle of Sadowa; the Franco-German War, bringing in its train the horrors of the Commune; the Boer War; the last War, and the present state of Europe! We have, indeed, supped full of horrors since 1849, despite all the efforts of a truth-diffusing Press, and the pulpit-eloquence of the ordained preachers of good-will among men.

None the less, "Hope springs eternal in the human breast," and it is possible to meet in that same Paris to-day and discuss a League of Nations without even an augural grin appearing upon our speaking countenances. Cobden was on the right lines all his life.

It is perhaps worth remarking that of the three heroes of orthodox evangelical Nonconformity in those days, Cobden, Bright, and (a little later) Gladstone, not one of them had any sympathy with the distinctive opinions of their adorers.

Cobden, like many men of his order of mind, was a solitary thinker, but little affected by the contagion of the crowd, even when the crowd was composed of those who were disposed to agree with him. As with Charles Lamb's "true Caledonian " you could not cry halves to anything Cobden found. "He does not find but brings and unloads his stock of ideas in perfect order and completeness."

In a notice of this very book of Mr. Hobson's in the Times, I found the reviewer contrasting Cobden's somewhat sluggish adhesion to the cause of the North in the early days of the American

Civil War, with the "illustrious" conduct of Bright, who espoused it without doubt or demur from the very first. "The Course of Events" is, indeed, a great newspaper god, above all other gods, and works marvels on editorial minds, but as I read the Times I could not help wondering what would have happened to me, who, as a small boy in Liverpool, was pinched black and blue at school for " sticking up " for Lincoln, had I been able in 1862 to carry my wounds to Printing House Square, and asked for sympathy for my sufferings in that glorious cause. Still, it must be just a little dull to be always not a day but, at least, thirty years after the fair.

Cobden's correspondence with Henry Richard, now for the first time published, is described by Mr. Hobson as a process of "feeding the Star (a paper of that name) with material chiefly on foreign and imperial affairs." To keep "feeding' a partisan print with its daily bread is an occupation which cannot long be carried on without moral and intellectual damage, and the publication of the process is to subject Cobden to a very severe test. He stands it better than could most men; although, occasionally, he does drop a hint or two from which even Lord Beaverbrook might condescend to learn, as to the best way of indoctrinating a stupid public with ideas from which had they been less cunningly introduced that same stupid public would instinctively have shrunk.

In conclusion, I suspect there will always be some fine folk whose nerves Cobden will occasionally fret. The idols of the Counting House are less attractive than (to employ Bacon's imagery) those

of the Tribe or of the Theatre; but these critics ought, in justice to Cobden, to remember that even if this "painful warrior famousëd for fight," who, sixty years ago and more, pleaded before Europe the cause of a League of Nations, had some scars hidden beneath his shining armour, he gained those in the days of his strenuous middle age, when he fought and won a glorious and resounding victory over a highly-placed and well-endowed band of greedy monopolists.