slavery to be a wrong; that the Reformation has dealt a heavy blow at theocracy, and Free-trade at monopoly.

But the spirit of war is still fostered and stimulated by false ideas of national honour, patriotism, and policy, and to the art of war we still devote our mightiest efforts, and consecrate our costliest sacrifices. The grosser forms of slavery have indeed disappeared, but the taint of that accursed thing is still to be traced in some of our laws, and in our treatment of subject races, while the spirit of its offspring 'feudalism' still lingers in the most important class of our body-politic. Our Reformed Church with its temporalities, and its exclusive pretensions and privileges, is still too often the enemy of the foundation of all freedom, the liberty of thought, and, by perverting the judgment of too many of its members, strikes at the root of human progress.

The last, and perhaps the most insidious, of the leading forms of 'spoliation,' commercial monopoly, though driven from its strongholds, and expelled from our national creed, is still regarded by many among us with secret favour, and by most of us rather as a political error than as a moral wrong.

It was to a struggle with this last great evil that Cobden devoted his life, and it is with the most decisive victory ever achieved in this field of conflict that his name and fame will be for ever identified; but it is significant and interesting to know that in selecting his work in life, it was to 'Education,' and not to 'Free-trade,' that his thoughts were first directed.

Two reasons decided him to prefer the latter as the object of his efforts :-Firstly, His conviction (referred to above) that the material prosperity of nations is the only foundation of all progress, and that if this were once secured the rest would surely follow. Secondly, His consciousness that no direct attempt to obtain a system of national education which deserved the name, could lead to any clear result in the life of his own generation, and that measured with those at his command, imposing as were the forces of resistance arrayed against him on the question of Free-trade, they were less formidable than those. which would be brought to bear against a measure which united in a common hostility the Established and the Dissenting Churches.

It was Cobden's fate or fortune to find himself, in taking up the cause of Free-trade, in the presence of one of the worst laws which the selfishness and folly of Governments have ever imposed on the weakness and ignorance of a people.

When the soil of a country is appropriated, the only means whereby an increasing population can limit the encroachments of the proprietors, is by working for foreign markets. Such a

population has only its labour to give in exchange for its requirements, and, if this labour is constantly increasing, while the produce of the soil is stationary, more of the first will steadily and progressively be demanded for less of the last.

This will be manifested by a fall of wages, which is, as has been well observed, the greatest of misfortunes when it is due. to natural causes the greatest of crimes when it is caused by the law.

The Corn Law was the fitting sequel to the French war. The ruling classes in England had seized with avidity on the reaction of feeling created by the excesses of the French Revolution, to conceal the real meaning of that event, and to discredit the principles of popular sovereignty which it asserted. They had at their mercy a people impoverished and degraded by the waste of blood and treasure in which years of war had involved their country; and seeing with dismay the prospect before them, which the peace had opened, of a fall in the prices of agricultural produce, under the beneficent operation of the great laws of free exchange, they resorted to the unjust and inhuman device of prolonging by Act of Parliament the artificial scarcity created by the war, and of thus preserving to the landed interest the profits which had been gained at the expense of the nation.

It is thus that as the forces of progress are invariably found to act and react on each other, the forces of resistance and of evil will ever be side by side, and that as protection, which means the isolation of nations, tends both by its direct and indirect effects to war, so war again engenders and perpetuates the spirit of protection. Free-trade, or, as Cobden called it, the International Law of the Almighty, which means the interdependence of nations, must bring with it the surest guarantee of peace, and peace inevitably leads to freer and freer commercial intercourse, and, therefore, while there is no sadder page in the modern history of England, than that which records the adoption of this law by the British Parliament, there is, to our minds, none more bright with the promise of future good than that on which was written, after thirty years of unjust and unnecessary suffering, its virtual and unconditional repeal.

But as the intellect and conscience of the country had failed so long to recognise the wide-spread evils of this pernicious law, and the fatal principles which lay at its root, so did they now most dimly and imperfectly apprehend the scope and consequences of its abolition.

It was called the repeal of a law; admitted to be the removal of an intolerable wrong; but we doubt whether in this country, except by the few gifted and far-seeing leaders of this great campaign, it was foreseen that it was an act which

involved, in its certain results, a reversal of the whole policy of England.

This was, however, clear enough to enlightened observers in other countries. By one of those rare and mysterious coincidences which sometimes exercise so powerful an influence on human affairs, it happened that while Cobden in England was bringing to bear on the great practical questions of his time and country, the principles of high morality and sound economy, which had been hitherto too little considered in connexion with each other, Frederic Bastiat was conceiving and maturing in France the system of political philosophy which has since been given to the world, and which still remains the best and most complete exposition of the views of which Cobden was the great representative.

It appears to us that these two men were necessary to each other. Without Cobden, Bastiat would have lost the powerful stimulant of practical example, and the wide range of facts which the movement in England supplied, and from which he drew much of his inspiration. Without Bastiat, Cobden's policy would not have been elaborated into a system, and, beyond his own immediate coadjutors and disciples, would probably have been most imperfectly understood on the Continent of Europe.

More than this, who can say what may not have been the effect on the minds of both these men, of the interchange of thoughts and opinions which freely passed between them?

In his brilliant history of the Anti-Corn-Law League, Cobden et la Ligue,' Bastiat thus describes the movement of which England was the theatre during that memorable struggle:

'I have endeavoured to state with all exactness the question which is being agitated in England. I have described the field of battle, the greatness of the interests which are there being discussed, the opposing forces, and the consequences of victory. I have shown, I believe, that though the heat of the contest may seem to be concentrated on questions of taxation, of custom-houses, of cereals, of sugar, it is, in point of fact, a question between monopoly and liberty, aristocracy and democracy,-a question of equality or inequality in the distribution of the general well-being. The question at issue is to know whether legislative power and political influence shall remain in the hands of the men of rapine, or in those of the men of toil; that is, whether they shall continue to embroil the world in troubles and deeds of violence, or sow the seeds of concord, of union, of justice, and of peace.

'What would be thought of the historian who could believe that armed Europe, at the beginning of this century, performed, under the leadership of the most able generals, so many feats of strategy, for the sole purpose of determining who should possess the narrow fields

that were the scenes of the battles of Austerlitz or of Wagram? The fate of dynasties and empires depended on those struggles. But the triumphs of force may be ephemeral; it is not so with the triumphs of opinion. And when we see the whole of a great people, whose influence on the world is undoubted, impregnate itself with the doctrines of justice and truth; when we see it repel the false ideas of supremacy which have so long rendered it dangerous to nations; when we see it ready to seize the political ascendant from the hands of a greedy and turbulent oligarchy, let us beware of believing, even when its first efforts seem to bear upon economic questions, that greater and nobler interests are not engaged in the struggle. For if, in the midst of many lessons of iniquity, many instances of international perversity, England, this imperceptible point of our globe, has seen so many great and useful ideas take root upon her soil,—if she was the cradle of the press, of trial by jury, of a representative system, of the abolition of slavery, in spite of the opposition of a powerful and pitiless oligarchy,-what may not the world expect from this same England when all her moral, social, and political power shall have passed, by a slow and difficult revolution, into the hands of democracy, a revolution peacefully accomplished in the minds of men under the leadership of an association which embraces in its bosom so many men, whose high intellectual power and unblemished character shed so much glory on their country, and on the century in which they live? Such a revolution is no simple event, no accident, no catastrophe due to an irresistible but evanescent enthusiasm. It is, if I may use the expression, a slow social cataclysm, changing all the conditions of life and of society, the sphere in which it lives and breathes. It is justice possessing herself of power; good sense of authority. It is the general weal, the weal of the people, of the masses, of the small and of the great, of the strong and of the weak, becoming the law of political action. It is the disappearance behind the scene of privilege, abuse, and caste-feeling, not by a palace-revolution or a street-rising, but by the progressive and general appreciation of the rights and duties of man. In a word, it is the triumph of human liberty; it is the death of monopoly, that Proteus of a thousand forms, now conqueror, now slave-owner; at one time lover of theocracy and feudalism, at another time assuming an industrial, a commercial, a financial, and even a philanthropic shape. Whatever disguise it might borrow, it could no longer bear the eye of public opinion, which has learned to recognise it under the scarlet uniform or under the black gown, under the planter's jacket and the noble peer's embroidered robe. Liberty for all! for every man a just and natural remuneration for his labour! for every man a just and natural avenue to equality in proportion to his energy, his intelligence, his prudence, and his morality. Free-trade with all the world! Peace with all the world! No more subjugation of colonies, no more army, no more navy, than is necessary for the maintenance of national independence! A radical distinction between that which is and that which is not the mission of government and law; political association reduced to

guarantee each man his liberty and safety against all unjust aggression, whether from without or from within; equal taxation, for the purpose of properly paying the men charged with this mission, and not to serve as a mask under the name of outlets for trade (débouchés), for outward usurpation, and, under the name of protection, for the mutual robbery of classes. Such is the real issue in England, though the field of battle may be confined to a custom-house question. But this question involves slavery in its modern form; for as Mr. Gibson, a member of the League, has said in Parliament, "To get possession of men, that we may make them work for our own profit, or to take possession of the fruits of their labour, is equally and always slavery; there is no difference but in the degree."

This passage, all due allowance made for the tendency to brilliant generalization which Bastiat shared with so many of his gifted countrymen, remains on the whole a most powerful, condensed, and accurate analysis of the great principles involved in the political conflict then passing in England, and is a testimony to the rare insight and sagacity of the writer. It also affords a marvellous illustration of the power which a clear and firm grasp of principles gives to the political student, in guiding his speculations on the most complicated problems which society presents.

The system of which the Corn-Laws were the corner-stone, traced to its source, rested on the principle of spoliation, and on the foundation of force.

That which was inaugurated by the overthrow of that law, rested on the principle of freedom, and on the foundation of justice.

Monopoly of trade, involving, as it must, the violation of the rights of property and of labour, both in the internal and external relations of a State, and implying, when carried to its logical consequences, national isolation, contains within itself the germs of inevitable decay and stagnation. To avoid these results, it is necessary that a Government which maintains it, should resort to all the expedients of force and fraud,-to conquests, colonial aggrandizement, maritime supremacy, foreign alliances, reciprocity treaties, and communism in the shape of poor-laws, -and should perpetually appeal to the worst and most contemptible passions of its people, to national pride, to false patriotism, to jealousy, to fear, and to selfishness, in order to keep alive its prestige, and to conceal its rottenness.

It is impossible not to admire the skill and resources of the ruling classes of England in their use of these expedients, but there was a point beyond which even these would not suffice to avert the national ruin; and with a debt of £800,000,000, a starving people, the universal distrust, and the avowed or concealed