with what genuine graphic force he wrote even in ordinary correspondence. It occurs in a letter to Mr. Ashworth:-"I have been for some weeks in one of the most secluded corners of England. Although my letter is dated from the quiet little close borough of Midhurst, the house in which I am living is about one and a half mile distant, in the neighbouring rural parish of Heyshott. The roof which now shelters me is the one under which I was born, and the room where I now sleep is the one in which I first drew breath. It is an old farm-house, which had for many years been turned into labourers' cottages. With the aid of the whitewasher and carpenter we have made a comfortable, weatherproof retreat for summer; and we are surrounded with pleasant woods and within a couple of miles of the summit of the South Down Hills, where we have the finest air and some of the prettiest views in England. At some future day I shall be delighted to initiate you into rural life. A Sussex hill-side village will be an interesting field for an exploring excursion for you. We have a population under three hundred in our parish. The acreage is about 2000, of which one proprietor, Colonel Wyndham, owns 1200 acres. He is a non-resident, as indeed are all the other proprietors. The clergyman is also non-resident. He lives at the village of Sledham, about three miles distant, where he has another living and a parsonage-house. He comes over to our parish to perform service once on Sundays alternately in the morning and afternoon. The church is in a ruinous state, the tower having fallen down many years ago. The parson draws about £300 a year in tithes, besides the produce of a few acres of glebeland. He is a decent man with a large family, spoken well of by everybody, and himself admits the evils of clerical absenteeism. We have no school and no schoolmaster, unless I give that title to a couple of cottages where illiterate old women collect a score or two of infants while their parents are in the fields. Thus our village' is without resident proprietors, or clergyman, or schoolmaster. Add to these disadvantages that the farmers are generally deficient of capital and do not

employ so many labourers as they might. The rates have been up to this time about six shillings in the pound. We are not under the new poor-law but in a Gilbert's Union, and almost all our expense is for outdoor relief. Here is a picture which will lead you to expect, when you visit us, a very ignorant and very poor population. There is no postoffice in the village. Every morning an old man aged about seventy goes into Midhurst for the letters. He charges a penny for every despatch he carries, including such miscellaneous articles as horse-collars, legs of mutton, empty sacks, and wheel-barrows. His letterbag for the whole village contains on an average from two to three letters daily, including newspapers. The only newspapers which enter the parish are two copies of Bell's Weekly Messenger, a sound old Tory Protectionist much patronized by drowsy farmers. The wages paid by the farmers are very low, not exceeding eight shillings a week. I am employing an old man nearly seventy, and his son about twenty-two, and his nephew about nineteen, at digging and removing some fences. I pay the two former nine shillings a week and the last eight shillings, and I am giving a shilling a week more than anybody else is paying. What surprises me is to observe how well the poor fellows work and how long they last. The South Down air, in the absence of South Down mutton, has something to do with the healthiness of these people, I dare say. The labourers have generally a garden and an allotment of a quarter of an acre; for the latter they pay 38. 9d. a year rent. We are in the midst of woods and on the border of common land, so that fuel is cheap. All the poor have a right to cut turf on the common for their firing, which costs 28. 3d. per thousand. The labourers who live in my cottages have pigs in their sties, but I believe it is not so universally. I have satisfied myself that however badly off the labourers may be at present, their condition was worse in the time of high-priced corn. In 1847, when bread was double its present price, the wages of the farm labourers were not raised more than two to three shillings a week. At that time a man with a family spent all that he

earned for bread, and still had not enough to sustain his household. I have it both from the labourers themselves and the millers from whom they buy their flour that they ran so deeply in debt for food during the high prices of 1847 that they have scarcely been able, in some cases up to the present, to pay off their score. The class feeling among the agricultural labourers is in favour of a cheap loaf. They dare not say much about it openly, but their instincts are serving them in the absence of economical knowledge, and they are unanimously against Chowler and the Protectionists. I can hardly pretend that in this world's-end spot we can say that any impulse has been given to the demand for agricultural labourers by the free-trade policy. Ours is about the last place that will feel its good effects. But there is one good sign that augurs well for the future. Skilled labourers, such as masons, joiners, blacksmiths, painters, and so on, are in very great request, and it is difficult to get work of that kind done in moderate time. I am inclined to think that in more favourable situations an impulse has likewise been imparted to unskilled labour. It is certain that during the late harvest-time there was a great difficulty in obtaining hands on the south side of the Downs towards the sea-coast, where labour is in more demand than here under the north side of the hills. I long to live to see an agricultural labourer strike for wages!" Without reference to the opinions expressed it will be seen how large a number of important topics is included in this extract from a simple friendly letter, and the ready ease with which each of those topics is in turn made strongly suggestive. The whole quotation may stand for an example of Cobden's style and manner of writing and speaking-the only difference being the added strength of terse and often vivid illustration, and earnest though quiet emphasis when he was addressing an audience. But we must look at him for a moment in relation to the war.

Cobden had strong and mostly positive opinions on those subjects which were agitating political circles. For Irish difficulties he had but one plan, though he confessed he did not know how it could be enforced. He would

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have cut up the land into small properties, leaving no estates so large as to favour absenteeism even from the parish. In order to provide the means of reducing taxation he would have proposed a "people's budget," an outline of which he sketched in a letter to Mr. Bright, and the provisions of which were doubtless in accord with the efforts of the Financial Reform Association. "I have been thinking and talking," he said, "about concocting a national budget” to serve for an object for financial reformers to work up to and to prevent their losing their time upon vague generalities. The plan must be one to unite all classes and interests, and to bring into one agitation the counties and the towns. I propose to reduce the army, navy, and ordnance from £18,500,000 to £10,000,000, and thus save £8,500,000. Upon the civil expenditure in all its branches, including the cost of collecting revenue and the management of crownlands, I propose to save £500,000. I propose to lay a probate and legacy duty on real property to affect both entailed and unentailed estates, by which would be got £1,500,000. Here is £11,500,000 to be used in reducing and abolishing duties, which I propose to dispose of as follows:

:

"Customs.-Tea, reduce duty to 18. per lb.; wood and timber, abolish duties; butter and cheese, abolish duties.

"Upwards of 100 smaller articles of the tariff to be abolished. (I would only leave about fifteen articles in the tariff paying customs duties.)

"Excise.-Malt, paper, soap, and hops, all duty abolished; window-tax and advertisement duty, all off.

"All these changes could be effected with £11,500,000. There are other duties which I should prefer to remove instead of one or two of them; but I have been guided materially by a desire to bring all interests to sympathize with the scheme. Thus the tea is to catch the merchants and all the old women in the country; the wood and timber, the shipbuilder; the malt and hops, the farmers; paper and soap, the Scotch anti-excise people; the window-tax, the shopocracy of London, Bath, &c.; the advertisements, the press."

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It is not to be supposed that Cobden had any strong expectations that his proposals to open negotiations with other countries for the reduction of armaments would be accepted. He firmly believed that the principles on which he had always opposed war were true, and he doubtless hoped that they would one day receive full recognition. He had persisted in advocating free-trade, and the corn-laws had been repealed, while there was a continued tendency to abolish or to diminish taxes on articles of necessary consumption. The same result might ultimately be achieved with regard to the mitigation of one of the chief causes of the burdens on the people of England and of other countries, and it was his duty not to let the subject rest whenever he had an opportunity of reviving it. When everybody was talking about the "Palace of Peace," and the results that might be expected from the Great International Exhibition, he estimated such probabilities at a lower value than many of those who two years afterwards were among the foremost advocates of war. What he did was to propose that the foreign minister should take advantage of the favourable opportunity to open negotiations with France for reducing the armed forces, and so setting an example to Europe. It was admitted that it would be a glorious consummation of the great peace congress, and one devoutly to be wished. Lord Palmerston and the majority of the government and the houses of parliament were ready to endorse the sentiment warmly enough, but to carry it into practice was quite another matter. The maxim that the best security for peace was to be always prepared for war had been too long accepted to be easily relinquished, although as a matter of fact England was not prepared for the war with Russia, and had to adopt a foreign enlistment bill in order to meet the sudden call for men to go to the Crimea. Cobden's complete doctrine condemned the recent subscription to foreign loans for military purposes. He had in 1848 declared that if Lord Palmerston had firmly protested against the Russian invasion of Hungary the czar would never have given his aid to Austria, and he denounced with all his energy the Austrian and

Russian loans, amounting respectively to seven and five and a half millions of exported capital to be lost in foreign wars. Such a course he contended was contrary not only to the principles of political economy but to the claims of morality. What paradox could be more flagrant than for a citizen to lend money to be the means of military preparations on the part of a foreign power when he knew, or ought to have known, that these very preparations for which he was providing would in their turn impose upon himself and the other taxpayers of his own country the burden of counter-preparations to meet them? What man with the most rudimentary sense of public duty could pretend that it was no affair of his to what use his money was put, so long as his interest was high and his security adequate? Austria with Russia had been engaged in a cruel and remorseless war, and then came stretching forth her blood-stained hand to honest Dutchmen and Englishmen, asking them to furnish the price of that hateful devastation. Not only was such a system a waste of national wealth, an anticipation of income, a destruction of capital, the imposition of a heavy and profitless burden on future generations; but it was a direct connivance at acts and a policy which the very men who were thus asked to lend their money to support it, professed to dislike and condemn, and had good reason for disliking and condemning. The system of foreign loans for warlike purposes by which England, Holland, Germany, and France were invited to pay for the arms, clothing, and food of the belligerents was a system calculated to perpetuate the horrors of war. Those who lent money for such purposes were destitute of any of those excuses by which men justify a resort to the sword. They could not plead patriotism, self-defence, or even anger, or the lust of military glory. They sat down coolly to calculate the chances to themselves of profit or loss in a game in which the lives of human beings were at stake. They had not even the savage and brutal gratification which the old pagans had, after they had paid for a seat in the amphitheatre, of witnessing the bloody combats of gladiators in the circus.