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IN seasons of doubt and failing faith, it has been a common pedient of the Church of Rome to excite a reaction by adding a new saint to the Calendar. The practice was believed to be of great efficacy in stablishing orthodoxy; although it provoked the sneer that the growth of the Church triumphant was in inverse ratio to that of the Church militant. A similar feeling must have suggested the suitability of the present moment for publishing a life of Cobden. At a time when men's convictions are being seriously shaken in the soundness of his opinions, and when his policy is working more widespread depression in our national prosperity than that which existed under the system he overturned, it is perhaps a judicious move to claim for Cobden his place in the Radical pantheon. There is one disadvantage attendant on the process of canonisation. The devil's advocate is allowed to have his say, and he seldom fails to put his finger on a speck in a robe that people had previously been well content to consider as spotless. In the case before us, however, we are inclined to think that the counsel we have alluded to would be much more inclined to rest his case upon the arguments of Mr. Morley than on the character of Cobden.

In some respects Mr. Morley's 'Life of Richard Cobden' compares advantageously with recent biographies of politicians of the same school. No statesman of eminence can die nowadays but his remains are pounced upon, as soon

as the breath is out of his body, by at least half-a-dozen literary ghouls, who will have their different memoirs ready for the press almost before the coffin is screwed down. Indeed in this impatient age we go farther, and write "lives" that their illustrious possessors show no immediate indications of relinquishing. Mr. Morley's memoir is, of course, of a very different stamp from a class of biographies that can have no higher value than to gratify public curiosity. Sixteen years have elapsed since Cobden's death; and if the time is too short to estimate the real influences of his work, it is long enough to justify an attempt to record the character and labours of the man before the generation that was contemporary with him has passed altogether away. Mr. Morley has had great advantages in writing his memoir. den has been long enough dead to make the revival of his memory interesting, and yet not so long as to render the events amid which he moved unfamiliar to us. His life, too, was almost wholly a public career, well marked and carefully recorded in the journalism of his time. There is amplitude of expressed opinion regarding both Cobden and his work to aid a biographer in forming his own views. As was to be expected, a writer of Mr. Morley's independence of mind follows his own judgment. We do not feel, however, that Cobden's memory profits by the author's originality. Cobden was the most genial of agitators, while Mr. Morley is the most bilious of biographers. Hence we meet with

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an incongruity between the author and his subject which must rather mar the enjoyment of the book, and which is not lessened by the fact that we have quite as much to do with Mr. Morley as with Mr. Cobden in these two volumes. Mr. Morley evidently is not possessed of the quality of self-suppression, that is so essential in the composition of a good biography. We do not doubt that his opinions upon politics and political economy are regarded as sound and weighty by persons of his own school; but even these must feel that he has pushed his own intellectual existence so far into the foreground as to throw Cobden into the shade. The result is, that his Life of Cobden' is a work which no one except the genuine Radical can read with patience.

The story of the Free Trade agitation, which can best be told through the life of its leader, is a subject of general interest to all classes of politicians at the present moment. Mr. Morley, however, presents himself between us and Cobden as an opaque body that always obstructs and sometimes baffles vision; and if his book be not widely read, the mishap is due to his own method. Cobden's career possesses interest for every one; but there are many, we fear, who have no more anxiety to learn Mr. Morley's views on matters political than to hear Mrs. Todgers's notion of a wooden leg. There is, however, one quality that Mr. Morley brings to his task as biographer which makes his work of value. His political views are so narrow he is so incapable of estimating that there can be another aspect to a question besides his own, and another construction placed upon statements the reverse of that which he has formed in his own mind that he lays bare

Cobden's character and the League agitation with perfect frankness. With the intolerance of his faction, he assumes that when he has stamped Cobden's conduct with his own approbation there can be no dissent. Nor can we complain that he leaves us in doubt as to the opinions that we are to form upon the successive stages of Cobden's career. Mr. Morley is as prompt in making his appearance at the end of each scene as the Chorus in a Greek play. He takes upon himself the task of directing the feelings of the audience, with a lofty scorn for the unappreciative, and a contumelious frown for any one who is disposed to raise a hiss; and so the performance goes on.

Apart from Cobden's political life, there is little to tell of him; but that little affords pleasant reading, and helps to neutralise the unfavourable view which cannot fail to be taken of his character as an agitator. The only pushing member of a shiftless, thriftless family, which he had to carry on his back all his life long, Cobden at the outset made his way in the world by the exercise of those qualities which we are wont to look upon as the characteristics of successful commercial enterprise. He first made his mark as a pushing commercial traveller; and the habits and views which he acquired in that line clung to him throughout life, and were the immediate causes of his successes and his failures. We have no intention of sneering at an important and respectable calling when we say that Cobden was as much a 'bagman when he was pushing his hobbies in Parliament, as when he was endeavouring to dispose of his calicoes and muslins in the markets of Lancashire or Yorkshire. He never for a moment realised the fact that politics and commerce are

two different spheres, and that the principles which regulate the one. cannot with propriety be imported into the other; and that the expedients which may legitimately be used to advance private enterests, cannot safely be used for the advancement of measures involving the destinies of nations. Yet this was the system on which Cobden wrought a system too successful and attractive to be allowed to die with him, we regret to say. He might have risen to the highest eminence of commercial prosperity; but instead, by neglecting his business for politics, he reduced his house to the verge of bankruptcy, from which it was only saved by the assistance of his friends. Instead of retiring with the fortune which he must undoubtedly have secured had he minded his factories, he spent the last fifteen years of his life upon the provision made for him by his admirers, and that not without not without repeated supplementary assistance. We do not wonder, then, that Mrs. Cobden should have said in the last year of her husband's life: "I sometimes think that, after all the good work that you have done, and in spite of fame and great position, it would have been better for us both if, after you and I married, we had gone to settle in the backwoods of Canada." Most people will agree that, so far as Cobden himself was concerned, his wife was right. His public life may be full of political triumph, but his private career is mainly one of pecuniary mischance.

It is due to Mr. Morley to say that he enables us to form a complete estimate of the feelings and principles which launched Cobden before the world as an agitator, and that he has succeeded in clearly tracing the development of his views, and in noting the points where one shade of policy passes

into another. We see in Cobden a born Radical. He starts in life with a dislike to what he regards as privileged classes, and a bitter hatred to any institutions that strike him as being exclusive. He is always unable to take an impartial grasp of the conditions binding together the many sections, so differently constituted, that make up the British nation. He has dreams of creating a Utopia, not by improving and harmonising existing relationships, but by the displacement of classes and the overthrow of institutions. In his early travels in America, he seems to have obtained occasional glimpses of a land of promise, and to have brought back impressions that helped greatly to make his views impracticable in their application to English politics. But it was his settlement in Manchester that really gave their distinctive character to Cobden's opinions. The wonderful impetus which had just been communicated to manufacturing industry by the application of steam-power, by the introduction of railways and steam-ships, and by the widening markets which the growth of America and the general peace of the Continent were offering, turned Cobden's head, as they turned the heads of many more astute men of business in the commercial centres of northern England. Manufactures, they saw, were to give a new colour to the national life of Britain. Capital, which had either been the exclusive possession of the aristocratic classes, or the accumulations of an old-fashioned and comparatively slow commerce, was now created with a rapidity, and to an extent, that gave something of the character of a mania to manufacturing enterprise. Great fortunes were rapidly made, and fell into the hands of men who, unused to the possession of wealth, began to

cast about them for recognition of their new position and influence. The marvellous growth

of those places which are now our greatest factory towns, and the apparent absence of limit to the extension of profitable industry, raised a presumption that the manufacturing classes were destined to overshadow all other sections of the community; that the land should be made subservient to the maintenance of factory of factory work; and that the nation ought to be called upon to make any sacrifices calculated to advance the interests that were to form the future mainstay of British prosperity. It was a manufacturing millennium that Cobden and his sanguine coadjutors were seeking to set up, if they could only elbow out of the way those who either did not share their enthusiasm, or who did not care to have their own prosperity impaired to swell the profits of the manufacturing populations.

There was much to be said in excuse of the spirit in which the Manchester party took to the field of politics. They did not then see the natural limits which must hem in every enterprise; they could not divine the accidental restrictions which the mutations of events must impose upon business; they had little conception of what competition and from what quarters they were in the future to be exposed to; and they did not dream of the altered relations that were to overtake capital and labour, and give a backward twist to the growth of factory fortunes. They had, however, a keen sense of what they conceived to be their immediate self-interest. Give them peace at any price, so that they might have markets open all over the world for their wares; and give them cheap food, so that their artisans might be supported

on moderate wages, and the working classes drawn towards the large towns, and they were well content that the rest of the country should be left undisturbed to make the best of its changed situation. If the farmer's profits were lessened, and the landlord's rents reduced, there would of course be less employment for rural labour, and bone and sinew would have to betake themselves to the great city to swell the supply of workmen there. We have never ceased to maintain that the battle of Free Trade was fought on interested grounds; and it is gratifying to have our view confirmed by one that has gone so thoroughly into the history of the movement as Mr. Morley has done. Speaking of Cobden's first appearance in Parliament, Mr. Morley says, with delightful ingenuousness:—

"Cobden's intervention in the de

bate was then a parliamentary incident. It was the symbol of a new spirit of self-assertion in a great social order. The Reform Bill had admitted manufacturing towns to a share of representation. Cobden lost no time in vindicating the reality of this representation. The conflict of the last five years was not merely a battle about a customs duty; it was a struggle for political influence and social equality between the landed aristocracy and the great industrialists. It is only by reading the correspondence of that time, and listening to the men who still survive without having left its passions behind them, that we realise the angry astonishment with which the old society of England beheld the first serious attempts of a new class to assert its claim to take a foremost place."

In other words, the Free Trade movement was an agitation for political power in the interests of a class, and not the "battle about a customs duty" which was to bring us national prosperity and do justice to every section of industry, as Cobden and his party always main

tained it to be. An admission like this simplifies greatly our task of considering Cobden's career. It was no crime of the "great industrialists" to enter on a struggle with the landed aristocracy for "political influence and social equality." Our constitution is so framed as to invite such contests; and the better every interest that holds a real stake in the country is represented in both Government and Legislature, the stronger must the nation be. But if the Free Trade agitation had been frankly acknowledged to be a pretext for striking a blow at the landed classes, and not pressed as a movement for promoting the general welfare of the nation, the issue of the struggle must have been much more doubtful; while our present views of the principles on which Free Trade rested must sustain a severe shock. If we look around us at the present time, we find much to corroborate Mr. Morley's assertion. If Free Trade was a blow aimed at the landed aristocracy, who shall say that in these days of agricultural depression, reduced rents, and farmers' alliances, it has not struck home? But in assenting to it, the country certainly did not mean to sanction any measure injurious to the landed classes; and the AntiCorn-Law League professed itself to be the friend of all interests connected with the land, and loudly declared that both owner and farmer must participate to the full extent in the universal prosperity that was to flow from its programme. The chief impression which a perusal of Mr. Morley's narrative of Cobden's struggles on behalf of the abolition of the Corn Laws leaves upon his readers, must be the feeling that an agitation which required such an enormous expenditure of money, oratory, and publications, continued over a number of years, could have had but a feeble hold

on the common-sense views of the English nation. The idea of Free Trade was new to the people outside the great cities, and they did not take to it with confidence until it had been crammed down their throats by every argument and expedient the League could think of, and fanned by every sidewind, political and social, that the agitators could make to blow on the impressionable minds of the masses. The populations of the chief towns, forgetting that man cannot live by bread alone, readily responded to the bait of a cheap loaf. But the county populations would not at first be persuaded by the League lecturers how badly off they were, and were rude enough to subject these emissaries to rough handling, which Mr. Morley unscrupulously sets down as having been prompted by the squirearchy and monopolists. The doctrines which the League taught were new and alarming enough to the people to rouse their feelings, and they resented the impassioned attacks upon those on whose lands they lived, and to whom they had been accustomed to look up to with respect. It was only by flavouring their doctrines with Radicalism, and even a dash of Communism, that the League orators succeeded in working up the passions of the masses outside the manufacturing centres. The agitation was popularly associated in the ideas of the labouring classes with the Chartist movement, and received no small support from the organisations that were at work in the advancement of that delusion. Cobden himself professed to be careful to keep Free Trade aloof from that impracticable political ideal; but, in reality, he was content to accept the influence of any other agitation that was thrown into his own scale.

What really strengthened Cob