the colleges did not know. The truth is that although he had little schooling, few of his critics had read as many books or as many men as he had read. The best scholar is not the man who learns the most, but the man who forgets the least, and Cobden forgot little. There was not a man at Oxford who had read as many chapters in the Book of Realities as Richard Cobden had. He had studied man as a moral, intellectual, spiritual, social, agricultural, manufacturing, and mercantile being, in his relations to this moral, intellectual, spiritual, social, agricultural, manufacturing, and mercantile world. His political wisdom grew out of a vast accumulation of useful knowledge; and herein it was that when he entered Parliament at thirty-seven years of age, there was not a man in the House of Commons so well equipped with political information, not one so competent in debate.

Cobden had a capacious brain, and his brain had shelves in it. Many other men have capacious brains, but without shelves. They have plenty of knowledge in their heads, but it is all out of order, tossed and tumbled in heterogeneous mixture, like the contents of their own libraries. Cobden furnished his brain with good knowledge, drilled and disciplined; every fact in its proper group, and every group on its proper shelf. By systematic economy of that kind he always had at hand an abundant supply of instances, facts, lessons, comparisons, and proofs. He was thus overwhelming in debate, especially in the House of Commons, where they care little for the pomp of declamation or the cadences of eloquence, except as these are emphasis to solid argument, and the vehicles of useful information. It was predicted that because Cobden succeeded on the platform he would fail in the House of Commons. This was a careless mistake, because the style of oratory that captured the crowds at Manchester and Stockport was the only style that the House of Commons will endure with patience; speech full of information, comparison, argument, and illustration; speech easy to understand, and without rhetorical superfluities of any kind. Although the House was unfriendly to him, his very first speech in Parliament was a success; because, in the vernacular of that House, "there was no nonsense in it." The members listened

to him with attention and ill-concealed annoyance, and what was of dangerous portent the prime minister listened also. The importance of this feature of it will appear further on.

After a man has become famous, and has passed away, his biographer, who is generally his eulig, has the advantage of his hero's completed career to guide him in describing any portion of it; and the description will be colored accordingly. Better, therefore, to read contemporary criticism when studying the character and work of any historic man; and for that reason some remarks made by The Illustrated London News of July 6, 1842, are put in evidence here. That paper was in livery at the time, and very servile toward the aristocracy and the court. It affected nerves, gout, and other genteel accomplishments; and it could be as hysterical as Volumnia Dedlock herself over the presumption of workers in wool, and cotton, and iron, and brass. And Sir Leicester Dedlock could not be more shocked than The Illustrated London News pretended to be, because the time had come in the evolutionary and revolutionary development of British politics, when the House of Commons could so far forget itself as to receive instruction from a cotton spinner covered all over, in a figurative sense, with the factory dust and smoke of Stockport. Mr. Cobden had been in Parliament only a year when the notice of him accompanied by his portrait appeared in The Illustrated London News. After some feigned contempt for Cobden, by way of apology to the aristocracy for speaking of him at all, it said:

"Mr. Cobden is one of those men of the age to whom enterprise and industry have brought wealth, the Reform Bill gave the advantages of becoming a senator, and whom the election of last year converted into one. He is a man of some talents and extreme opinions. . . . We have taken Mr. Cobden this week, not so much from the actual position he occupies in the estimation of the public, as that he is a very fair specimen of the class of men who are considered by many as representing the manufacturing interest, though this is not entirely the case."

Comparing Mr. Cobden with the kettledrum ranter Ferrand, it says: "We do not contrast the opinions of those men from any great importance we attach to either of the individuals holding them." Then, after insinuating that Cobden denounced

the aristocracy because he did not belong to the order, it continued thus:

"Mr. Cobden sits for the Borough of Stockport, and as a debater occupies a very creditable position in the House. He is a close reasoner, very seldom going beside the question or losing sight of the main points of his own or his opponent's argument. He has sufficient power of declamation to impart energy to his manner, but he is never led away by it, or falls into that style which invariably meets with the greatest contempt from the House-that of the loud-tongued, empty ranter. He is always well prepared to support his statements, and generally has with him a formidable array of documents. It is a creditable tribute to his abilities that he generally commands the attention of the House; and if he has failed to convince the premier of the expediency of the policy laid down by the Anti-Corn-Law League, it is not because the Right Honorable Baronet has failed to listen to him."

The point and pith of all are in those last words, which admit that Cobden, even thus early in his parliamentary career, had compelled the attention of the prime minister; and this of itself was an achievement full of important consequences to England. It is easy to say now, after what occurred in 1846, that Sir Robert Peel was captured by what Lord Beaconsfield called "the persuasive eloquence of Cobden"; but here is contemporaneous evidence that Cobden had begun to fascinate Peel as early as 1842. This was a wonderful conquest, considering the quality and political rank of Peel. He was a very great man, the undisputed master and chief of the Protectionist party, a mature statesman who had been a member of the House of Commons for thirty-five years, and in the language of his vitriolic enemy, Lord Beaconsfield, he was "the greatest member of Parliament that ever lived." He had been prime minister seven years before, and in some capacity or other he had held high rank in the Tory councils as a cabinet minister almost from the days of Pitt. He possessed a very large private fortune and was grandly independent. In manners he was haughty and reserved; but the aristocracy leaned upon him as the ablest politician in England, although they were always doubtful and fearful about the strength of his backbone.

After the demoralization of the Tory party by the revolution of 1832, Sir Robert Peel gathered the fragments together and

put them into such a state of discipline and efficiency, that in the general election of 1841 he was able to lead the party to a most astonishing victory, so that when the new Parliament met, he became prime minister with an obedient majority behind him in the House of Commons of nearly a hundred votes over the Whigs, Radicals, Free Traders, the Irish party, and all the other opposition elements combined. Out of 658 members in the House, there were scarcely a hundred Free Traders.

To confront Peel in command of this victorious majority appeared a new and untried man, a cotton spinner from the "black country," armed with some "dismal science" called political economy; a "bagman" as they derisively nicknamed him, for Cobden had been a commercial traveler in his younger days. In a letter written at this time to his brother, he said, "I am regarded as a Gothic invader." The best that a new member of that kind could expect from the haughty prime minister was the condescension of a patrician sneer or a display of tired feeling made exasperating by a supercilious air of inattention, indifference, and contempt. Many aspiring men of good ability have been condemned to years of obscurity in Parliament by treatment of that kind; but Cobden was not to be snuffed out in that way; and from the very beginning the House realized that here was a man who had something to say; and willing or unwilling, all parties were compelled to listen to him. Referring to the hypnotic spell which Cobden wove around his great antagonist, Lord Beaconsfield says:

"Sir Robert Peel had a dangerous sympathy with the creations of others. He was ever on the lookout for new ideas, and when he found them he embraced them with eagerness, and often with precipitancy. . . There was always some person representing some theory or system exercising an influence over his mind. In his "sallet" days it was Mr. Horner or Sir Samuel Romilly; in later and more important periods it was the duke of Wellington, the king of the French, Mr. Jones Lloyd, some others, and finally Mr. Cobden."

It is necessary to refer briefly to the Free Trade struggle which, chiefly under the direction of Cobden, was carried on from 1838 to 1846. In the year 1838 seven men in a little room in Manchester organized the Anti-Corn-Law League, the most

powerful moral force combination outside of Parliament that had ever been seen in England. Of this body Cobden was the organizing genius, the commissary general of its argument, and its most convincing orator.

In 1838 the Protective system was almost at the zenith of its mischief. It had pampered the landlords and the aristocracy; but it had reduced the middle classes to a "shabby genteel" condition; and the workingmen to comparative destitution. It laid a heavy tax upon bread for the protection of landlords; and upon manufactures for the benefit of mill owners; and the chronic condition of the English laborer was that of hunger. Class ignorance, stupid and strong as a ship of war, guarded the Protective system. Even the workingmen opposed Free Trade as a conspiracy to lower wages; and sensitive through moral ignorance, their passions were bitterly aroused when it was proposed to put the noble British workingman into competition with the "pauper labor" of the continent.

The strategy of the League outside of Parliament was a campaign of education; inside, it was a campaign of demonstration, the condition of England being illustrated by ghastly word pictures that made Peel solemn and uncomfortable. He was in office to maintain Protection, and the facts made the Protective system responsible for a large part of the public misery. Cobden felt a business contempt for the Tory majority that frowned upon him from the ministerial benches. He regarded most of the lordlings and squires over there as overfed and underbred, vain, insolent, and dull. He looked upon Lord Stanley and Sir Robert Peel as the only formidable men on the Tory side; and, in a letter to his brother written just after making his maiden speech, he said: "Stanley scowls and Peel there is no other man on

smiles at me, both meaning mischief; their side who is at all formidable." Here he underrated Gladstone, who was always formidable, although Cobden did not think so, for he said, "Gladstone makes a very clever aid-decamp to Peel, but he is nothing without him."

It is not necessary to describe in detail the progress of the struggle: how monopoly held on with a death grip to its unjust