tion of all human progress. It may be a subject of regret to those who prefer the contemplation of types of humanity, which they too hastily assume to be the product of aristocratic institutions alone, to the widespread and general diffusion of well-being among all the classes of a nation, but it is not a question of taste, it is one of necessity.

The progress of this law has already profoundly modified the conditions of modern society. The downfall of the feudal system, and the gradual adoption of the representative principle in most of the countries of Europe, have rendered necessary a searching examination of the institutions and policy, which had their origin in an order of things which is passing away.

So far as England is concerned in the solution of this problem, no man was more alive than Cobden to the aristocratic instincts of the nation, or less disposed to advocate republican institutions among us; but he saw (and it is idle to shut our eyes to the fact) that if our mixed system of government was to be maintained, we could only raise the masses of our countrymen from their present degradation, and hold our places among the nations of the earth, by the adoption of principles of policy by which the forces of the State should be economized to the utmost, and the interests of the people amply and liberally secured. In his paper on England, Ireland and America, Cobden says:—

'But they who argue in favour of a republic, in lieu of a mixed monarchy for Great Britain, are, we suspect, ignorant of the genius of their countrymen. Democracy forms no element in the materials of English character. An Englishman is from his mother's womb, an aristocrat. Whatever rauk or birth, whatever fortune, trade, or profession may be his fate, he is, or wishes or hopes to be, an aristocrat. The insatiable love of caste that in England, as in Hindostan devours all hearts, is confined to no walks of society, but pervades every degree, from the highest to the lowest. Of what conceivable use, then, would it be to strike down the lofty patricians that have descended to us from the days of the Normans and the Plantagenets, if we of the middle class-who are more enslaved than any other to this passion -are prepared to lift up, from amongst ourselves, an aristocracy of mere wealth, not less austere, nor less selfish, only less noble than that we had deposed? No: whatever changes, in the course of time, education may, and will effect, we do not believe that England, at this moment, contains even the germs of genuine republicanism.

We do not, then, advocate the adoption of democratic institutions for such a people. But the examples held forth to us by the Americans, of strict economy, of peaceful non-inter

ference, of universal education, and of other public improvements, may, and indeed must, be emulated by the Government of this country, if the people are to be allowed even the republican community. If it be objected that chance of surviving a competition with that an economical government is inconsistent with the maintenance of the monarchical and aristocratic institutions of this land, then we answer, Let an unflinching economy and retrenchment be enforced-ruat cœlum!"

Mr. Cobden belonged to the school of political thinkers, who believe in the perfect harmony of moral and economical laws, and that in proportion as these are recognised, understood, and obeyed, by nations, will be their advance in all that constitutes civi

lisation.

He believed that the interest of the individual, the interest of the nation, and the interests of all nations, are identical; and that these several interests are all in entire and necessary concordance with the highest interests of morality. With this belief, an economic truth acquired with him the dignity and vitality of a moral law, and instead of remaining a barren abstract doctrine of the intellect, became a living force which moved the hearts and consciences of men.

It is to a want of a clear conception of this great harmony between the moral and economic law, or to a disbelief in its existtence, that are to be traced some of the most pernicious errors of modern times.

influence than

In France, from an imperfect and superwhich economic science rests, and from the ficial knowledge of the order of facts on prevalence of false ideas of society derived from classical antiquity, the principles of government, whether under a republic, a constitutional monarchy, or an empire, have, until recently, been in many essential respects opposed to the law of material progress. Rousseau, who exercised a greater any other man upon the great French Revolution, and after him Robespierre and Mirabeau,-two great figures who represent and personify that mighty upheaving of society-were all fatally and fundamentally wrong in their conception of the right of property. This, instead of regarding as a right preceding all law, and lying at the root of all social existence, they considered simply as a creation of the law, which, again, derived its rights from a social compact, opposed, in many respects, to the natural rights of man. Society itself was thus made to rest upon the quicksand of human invention, instead of the rock of God's providence; and law was made the source, instead of the guardian, of personal liberty and of private property.

Hence the disastrous shipwreck of a great cause, the follies and the crimes, the wild theories, the barren experiments, and the inevitable reaction. The principle involved, the State, was stronger than the men who appealed to it, and swallowed them up in a military despotism.

This false direction of ideas survived the Restoration, and when, after 1830, the intellect of France again addressed itself to social questions, it was with the same result. Saint Simon, Fourier, Louis Blanc, and Proudhon are there to attest the deep-rooted perversion of thought which has hitherto made all free government impossible in France, and brought upon her again, for the second time, the stern hand of the military ruler.

The great founder of the English school of political economy, who had witnessed himself in France the same disorders, and speculated on their causes, viewed them from another side. He instinctively perceived that, as all human society must rest upon a material foundation, it was to the laws of material progress that inquiry must be first directed, and that before and beneath all systems of government and all schemes of public morality, there must lie the science of the 'wealth of nations.' To the investigation of this science Adam Smith devoted those years of patient and conscientious thought, to which we owe the treatise which has made his name immortal, and which, in spite of much that has been added, and much that has been taken from it since, remains as a great storehouse of knowledge to the students of economic laws.

In the hands of Smith, however, it is easy to trace the habitual connexion in his mind between the dry facts of science and the great social laws which alone give them life and meaning, and the steady natural gravitation of all the interests of our race towards order and moral progress.

The school of English economists who succeeded him, appear to us to have too much lost sight of this necessary connexion, and to have dwelt too exclusively on the phenomena of economic facts, as distinct and separate from their correlative moral consequences. To this cause we attribute the absence of adequate political results which has attended their teaching, the repugnance which their doctrines have too often excited in generous and ardent natures, and the consequent discredit of a science indispensable to the progress and prosperity of nations, and destined, perhaps more than any other branch of human knowledge, to reconcile the ways of God to man.

The first great law of humanity is labour.

| 'By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou cat thy bread.' From this there is no escape. The burden will be lightened as the forces of nature are brought by science and industry more under the control of man; and it may be shifted, as it is, from the whole to a part of society, but the law remains.

It is this law, then, the law of labour, which lies at the root of all human life. Upon this foundation rests the whole fabric of society, religion, morals, science, art, literature-all that adorns or exalts existence. But if the law of labour is thus paramount and sovereign, it follows that its rights are sacred, and that there can be no permanent security for any society in which these are not protected. The rights of labour involve and comprehend the right of personal liberty and the right of property; the first implies the free use of each man's powers and faculties, the second, an inalienable title to the products of his labour, in use, or in exchange.

It is to the violation of the rights of labour and of property, thus identified, in all the various forms of human oppression and injustice, by force, or by fraud, in defiance of law, or in the name of law, that is to be traced the greatest part of the disorders and sufferings which have desolated humanity, and the unnecessary and unnatural inequalities in the conditions of men.

It is to the assertion of these rights, and to the gradual ascendency of the opposing and equalizing principles of justice and freedom, that the coming generations alone can look for a future which shall be better than the past.

'Il n'y a que deux moyens,' says Bastiat, 'de se procurer les choses nécessaires à la conservation, à l'embellissement, et au perfectionnement de la vie,-la production et la spoliation.' And again, 'Propriété et spoliation, sœurs nées du même père, Génie du Bien, et Génie du Mal, Salut et Fléau de la Société, Puissances qui se disputent depuis le commencement l'empire et les destinées du monde.'

These truths, though familiar to us now, are of comparatively recent acceptance even in theory among us, and in practice still are far indeed from being applied. Such, moreover, is the confusion of thought, engendered by historical associations, political prejudice, and class interest, that many of the forms of spoliation are hardly recognised when disguised in the garb of a British institution, a party principle, or a vested right; in which artificial costume they still impose on the credulity of our countrymen,

It is true that war is generally admitted to be an evil, and 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 bodypolitic. 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 strong holds, 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 imperfect

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-CornLaw 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 ques

power and political influence shall remain in the hands of the men of rapine, or in those of continue to embroil the world in troubles and the men of toil; that is, whether they shall deeds of violence, or sow the seeds of concord, of union, of justice, and of peace.

เ

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 initself with the doctrines of justice and truth; fluence on the world is undoubted, impregnate 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 world expect from this same England when all and pitiless oligarchy,-what may not the 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 high intellectual power and unblemished charembraces in its bosom so many men, whose acter 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 conwhich it lives and breathes. It is justice posditions of life and of society, the sphere in sessing 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 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

man.