Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 389, March 1848

MR COBDEN ON THE NATIONAL DEFENCES

It is popularly averred by our Southern neighbours that the house of every Englishman is his castle. No doubt to a certain extent this may be true. In the modern mansion, as in the ancient fortalice, the victualing department is always a matter of prime importance, and Chubb's patent safety lock may be accepted as a convenient substitute for the portcullis. Yet, after all, we suspect that the resemblance, if the matter be closely investigated, will turn out to be rather imaginary than real. A castle, according to the ideas which we have imbibed from an early course of miscellaneous and feudal reading, must have been a sort of earthly paradise, and the possessors of it wholly exempt from that never-ending series of daily persecution to which we, unhappy moderns, are subjected. With a good eight-foot thick wall of solid masonry around, a moat broad enough to baffle the leap of Flying Childers, and deep enough to have drenched the scalping-lock of Goliath of Gath, and a few falconets and patereroes symmetrically arranged along the parapets, a man might afford to enjoy a quiet night's rest without dread of duns, or any fear of the visits of that most malignant of unexecuted ruffians, the tax-gatherer. He might give a jocular rejoinder to the summons of the pursuivant who appeared before his gates with the intelligence of a further railway call; and dismay any invading snip by the apparition of a scarecrow dangling from a gallows on the summit of the donjon-keep. Nay, if currency were absolutely indispensable for the purpose of paying the garrison, Castle Dangerous would be more effective than the bank parlour has shown itself in late times under the operation of Sir Robert Peel's Act for the perpetuation of national bankruptcy. A simple announcement in the neighbouring town of a large assortment of cast-off uniforms and rusty armour for sale, would infallibly attract to the stronghold a collection of Caucasians who adhere to the Jewish persuasion. Once within the guard-room, we should deal summarily, and after the manner of Sir Reginald Front-de-Bœuf, with these infidels. The forceps should be produced, and no ether or chloroform, upon any pretext whatever, allowed. We should negotiate with Moses or Mephibosheth at the rate of units for a stump, tens for a decayed, and hundreds for an unimpeachable grinder; and may we never shake shekel again if we do not think we could extract a reasonable amount of ransom from the jaws of the Princes of the Captivity! As to the advent of many enemies, we should be utterly and entirely fearless. Cohorn and Vauban might come with their lines, and mines, and battering-trains without disturbing our equanimity, or causing the slightest tremor in our hand as we filled out our post-prandial bumpers of Bordeaux. So long as powder lasted and shot was plentiful, we should reciprocate the hostile compliments by all manner of shell and canister; and, if the metal of the rogues proved, in the long run, too heavy for us, they should have our full permission to pound away until they were tired; and, on entering the citadel, they would find us smoking our pipe in the cartridge-room, as cool as a cucumber, or as Marius at Carthage, or General Chassé at Antwerp, or any other warrior and hero of antiquity whomsoever.

Now take that picture – compare it with the state of your present domicile – and tell us whether, in effect, the fortalice is not an Eden? What kind of existence do you lead in that Heriot Row house, for which, last year, when shares were up, you were ass enough to pay some two or three thousand pounds? You cannot go into your room after breakfast to write an article for Blackwood, or to draw a condescendence, without hearing every five minutes the dissonance of that ceaseless bell. Not unearned are poor Grizzy's eleemosynary Christmas shoes, for fully one-half of the day is that most weary wight occupied in flitting from the regions beneath to answer the summons which may bring an invitation or a fee, but which, in nine cases out of ten, is the announcement of a gaping creditor. First, in comes a document wafered, according to that beastly practice, which, for the credit of Tyre and Sidon, we hope is a modern invention. That, of course, goes into the waste basket without more remark than a passing objurgation. Then follow the prospectuses of three insurance companies, you being nearly ruined already with the amount which you are compelled to pay annually, in virtue of your marriage contract, to the Scottish Widows' Fund. Next appears a long slip, purporting to be the intimation of a police assessment. You swear savagely, having ascertained the fact, by dint of a spirited correspondence in the newspapers, that the available force of that esteemed body in the metropolis of Scotland is not much over a dozen, and having accurate personal corroboration of the statistics by walking the other day into an unmolested bicker, from which you emerged with a broken hat, and a head phrenologised by a blacking bottle. Before you have recovered from this, you receive another missive with a charge for cleaning the streets – an operation which you know, to your cost, has been performed throughout the last thaw exclusively by the petticoats of the females; and upon the back of this appear mulctures touching gas and water. A huge oblong missive, the envelope whereof bears on a corner the letters O. H. M. S., and which is sealed with a most imposing and royal escutcheon, deludes you for a moment into the belief that Lord John Russell has at last exhibited a gleam of common-sense, and has recommended you to her Majesty either for a commissionership or for a reasonable place on the pension list, in consequence of your balaamite contributions to the unsaleable Edinburgh Review. You open it, and behold, it contains nothing but a warning that you have not paid the last quarter of your compounded and thrice confounded income-tax! A gentleman next requests the honour of a moment's interview. In the hope that he may prove a Writer to the Signet, you weakly yield; and incontinently an individual with a strong Israelitish countenance, a fetid breath, and an odour of stale tobacco floating around his person, solicits the honour of your custom for a packet of sealing-wax, a gross of steel pens, or a new edition of the Pentateuch. You eject him in a tornado of wrath; but the cup of your misery is not full. Aaron is succeeded by Mendizabel – an expatriated Spanish grandee, who bears a strong recommendation from an individual whose handwriting seems to be attached to every begging petition in the country. This fellow won't choose to understand you, however frantic you may appear; so that, for the sake of peace, you violate your conscience and get rid of him at the expenditure of a shilling. Grizzy is called up, and severely reprimanded for her want of discrimination in admitting the illustrious stranger; and the consequence is that, on the very next summons, she peremptorily denies you to a Glasgow agent who has come through by special train for a consultation on a case of emergency. Last of all, just as you are settling steadily to your work, and turning over the third sheet of foolscap, in walks your friend the Haveril, on no earthly errand whatever, except to inquire how you are getting on. Of all social pests, this kind of animal is undoubtedly the worst. In intellect he is singularly weak: in disposition curious and prying. He hops about your study like a magpie, eying every letter, as though he longed to make himself master of its contents; and, notwithstanding that you believe the creature to be strictly honest, you would on no account leave him for a couple of minutes in undisturbed possession of the sanctum. He peeps into every book, indulges you with a quantity of small literary swipes, and finally fastening upon a volume of prints, entreats you to go on with your occupation, as he, the Haveril, is perfectly competent to the task of entertaining himself. Culpable homicide, say our law-books, ranges from a crime of great enormity to the smallest possible fraction of imputed guilt; and if, under such aggravating circumstances, you were to toss your acquaintance out of the window, it is not likely that your subsequent sentence would be severe. But you have at the bottom of your heart a sort of attachment to the nincompoop, whom you know to be utterly harmless, and who, moreover, to do him justice, invariably stands up for you, whenever you are assailed in your absence. Therefore you abstain from violence, and the penance which you heroically undergo is but one degree short of martyrdom. Under the visitation of these Egyptian plagues, the morning wears insensibly away; and the imp of darkness, when he calls for copy about dinner-time, is summarily exorcised, and dispatched, empty-handed, to the solitudes of his awful den! Is there, then, any feasible case of resemblance between the fortress and the modern mansion?

We have been led into this train of thought by a perusal of the speeches lately delivered at Manchester on the subject of our national defences. The question is one of undoubted interest to us all, and it is well that it should be brought forward and thoroughly discussed in time. If there is danger, either immediate or impending, let us know it, and then, to a certain extent, we shall be forwarned if not forearmed. The Duke of Wellington – a tolerable military authority, as times go – has already given us his opinion on the point, and that opinion has been immediately met and contradicted by the sapient Mr Richard Cobden. We have yet to learn the exact amount of Mr Cobden's attainments in the arts of strategy and fortification; but as he is undoubtedly a "myriad-minded" gentleman, of fair average conceit, and more than average effrontery, and as we have hitherto abstained from making special mention of him in our columns, it may, perhaps, be worth while to see how he has acquitted himself in the lists against the veteran conqueror of Napoleon. Our old friend Tomkins – he of the Ten Tumblers – used to be, if we recollect aright, rather eloquent upon this weighty topic. Tomkins, in early life, had sustained an amatory disappointment, in competition with a thwacking drum-major; and therefore always looked upon the army with somewhat of a jaundiced eye. The sound of the fife, clarion, and trumpet was ever after distasteful to his ear; and he never trotted his mare past a marching regiment of these scarlet locusts, without a spasm of righteous indignation. "They eat our bread, sir!" he would say, "and drink of our cup, and do absolutely nothing in return. The sooner we get rid of them the better. An Englishman, sir, needs no hired supernumeraries to protect his home. When was our soil ever invaded? Let the French come, and we will give them graves!" And having delivered himself of this sublime sentiment, Tomkins would incontinently ring for another tumbler. It always struck us, however, as a singular proof of the eccentricities or rather inconsistencies of genius, that our distinguished friend, when in his cups, and towards the close of the evening, invariably began to glorify himself upon his length of lineage and descent. In support of these heraldic claims, he was wont to cite the case of his great progenitor, "the founder of the family," who just about a century ago had the condescension to hold the stirrup of Lord George Murray, as he alighted from his horse when the clans marched into Derby. Tomkins, on the strength of this anecdote, had rather a kindly feeling towards the Jacobites, and would never allow that the enterprise had at any time the character of an invasion. "We were ready, sir," he would exclaim, "to have marched up, in the Reform year, from Birmingham to London; and who can doubt that, had we done so, we should have driven the household troops before us as the chaff flies out from the fanners?"

We have often deeply regretted that Tomkins did not survive to witness the consummation of the triumphs of free-trade – a cause which he contributed materially by his efforts and his writings to advance. The leading feature of his character was the total absence of every kind of prejudice or bigotry. He held it to be a fundamental principle, as old as Magna Charta, that England was to be governed mainly through the influence of cotton: that all other interests were immeasurably inferior to this, and that the settlement and maintenance of our colonies was a gross instance of reckless and frantic extravagance. "Let us thrive," he would say, "through the arts of universal peace. Let us set a bright example to the world by opening our ports to the free admission of all foreign produce, without any kind of reciprocity whatever. If our artisans and workmen cannot maintain their ground, let them go to the comfortable Unions we have provided, and pick oakum in return for their rations of wholesome bone-soup! Let us hear no more nonsense about humanity or short-time! Cram the children into the factories so soon as they can walk. Early habits are the surest means of promoting and fostering industry. Let us look to our imports, and the exports will look after themselves. Disband the army. Reduce the navy. Do away with Church establishments. Contract the currency. Flabbergast the colonies; and Great Britain must go ahead!" Such were the expressed opinions of that great and good man, who now sleeps in a premature sepulchre at Staley Bridge: and we need hardly add, that in matters of revenue, he was an uncompromising advocate of the sponge. Had his valuable existence been prolonged for a few years, he would doubtless have been at the head of the onward movement, and might have shared in the rewards which are gratefully accorded to the patriots of this latter age. Andrew Marvell, sitting incorruptible in his garret with a shoulder-blade of mutton, has ceased to be a favourite example with the new democratic school. They affect ovations and banquets, perform continental reforming tours, and demean themselves after the manner of our able correspondent, Mr Dunshunner, who, we are glad to observe, has been lately invited to a free-trade demonstration on the banks of the Bosphorus, by several of the leading Muftis of Constantinople. Dunshunner writes in great spirits, and has promised us an early paper, on the advantage of our establishing free-trade relations with the domestic Circassian market.

Failing Tomkins, we have every reason to be proud of his disciple and successor, Mr Cobden. In fact, the mantle of our lamented friend has fallen most gracefully upon his shoulders; and in nothing is the genuine likeness more displayed, than in the contempt which both of them have exhibited for the standing army of Great Britain. Yet, perhaps, in this we may be doing Mr Cobden some little wrong. Tomkins, we know, had just and natural reason for abhorring the sight of a red-coat; Cobden, so far as we are aware, has no such motive for dislike. Of the two, he is the calmer and the cooler man, and very naturally looks sedulously about him for the means of substantiating his theories. After all the fine words which Sir Robert Peel bestowed upon him, to no visible improvement of his parsnips, Mr Cobden very naturally felt a little uneasy at the non-fulfilment of several of his prophecies. It is a pity that a man cannot vaticinate in this country without undergoing a certain risk of subsequent stultification; and yet, if he does not affect the gift of prophecy, your patriot is usually at a discount. Our memory is not a very good one, and yet we have hardly forgotten certain flourishes by Mr Cobden, regarding the immense amount of employment which was to accrue to this country, immediately after the passing of his favourite measures. Bread was to be as cheap as dirt, common luxuries within the reach of every one, and the whole British nation, through its length and breadth, was to hold a perpetual jubilee and jollification, to the music of the engine and the shuttle.

and, were we to add, in the words of Mr Canning's imitation of the above passage, the concluding line,

it would not, we apprehend, be entirely foreign to the subject. The result, however, so far as we have yet seen, has by no means justified the experiment. Trade, instead of improving under the stimulus of free-trade, has fallen off, and a year of commercial panic and misery has been the result of the liberal nostrum. This, no doubt, is very galling to our friends of the billy-roller. Old stagers like us, who are sometimes represented as prosy, because we reverence time-honoured principles, love the constitution of our country, and defend the memory of those who were the true founders of its greatness, are supposed to feel some triumph at the aspect of the present depression, and to exult over the slough of despond in which the Whigs are left to flounder. If there be any who, judging from their own mean nature, so think of us, it is hardly worth our while to undeceive them. Bitterly indeed have we mourned over the spectacle of fraud and imbecility which the last two years have disclosed in the higher places of the land, and most earnestly do we hope that, ere long, the true-hearted people of this country will awake to a full sense of their present perilous and by no means creditable position. All the difficulties which are just now pressing upon ministers, and which, for a longer period than we can venture to calculate, must continue to environ them, are of their own creating, and are the natural effects of that unconstitutional policy which would sacrifice every thing for the mere possession of power. Do we speak truth or not? Let the Chancellor of the Exchequer answer us. What but free-trade and its concomitant schemes has lessened the revenue and increased the pauperism of the country? What but the vicious and yet invincible desire of change, consequent on a contest for popularity, has struck a blow at the prosperity, and even the existence, of our colonies, which has already reacted with fearful effect within the centre of the mother-country?

Mr Cobden, on being twitted with the failure, or, at all events, the non-realisation of his unqualified prophecies, very naturally, but not very wisely, flies into a passion. He fixes, of course, upon the failure of the harvest of 1846 as the prime element of justification. Can I control the elements? – says he – can I regulate the seasons? Certainly not, Mr Cobden. We presume that no one, not even the stupidest operative that used to bellow in your congregation, and who believed every one of the golden promises which you were hardy enough to enunciate, ever dreamed that you were in possession of that power. Several of us, moreover, are of opinion that, upon the whole, you have been rather overrated as a conjurer, and that, having failed in your endeavours to get into an empty quart bottle, you are not a whit more likely to succeed when you come to experiment upon a pint. But let us whisper in your ear that this excuse will hardly serve your turn, and that it is wholly irreconcilable with the arguments which you used to advance. A copious supply of foreign grain was the very thing for which you and your associates primarily clamoured. You wanted an import to a prodigious extent, and you flattered yourselves that, for each quarter of American wheat, you would be able to send in exchange so many yards of that calico which you fondly maintain to be the principal fabric of the world. You were content, and you have said it over and over again, to take your chance of the home market, provided the other ones were opened to you. Now that you have them open, and now that wheat has come in such abundance as even your most sanguine anticipations could not have conceived, you have the coolness and effrontery to turn round and throw the blame upon Providence, for having speedily brought about the very thing which every charlatan in Great Britain has been shouting for since the anti-corn-law league began! Do you really think that this will go down with any portion of the community? that such deplorable wriggling will not insure you, throughout the country, the contempt of every man of average and common understanding? or that the labourer on short time, and the artisan whom you have deprived of his employment, will put up with such miserable excuses? The plain state of the fact is, – and you know it, – that your theories are crumbling beneath your feet. You cannot expect that your gross and egregious error will escape a speedy detection. You, without any previous qualification for the task, save your natural talent, which is not much, have thrust yourself forward to a prominence which you never were entitled to occupy. You may fancy yourself, if you choose, the people's man; but so were Jack Cade, and Wat Tyler, and several others, who, mistaking energy for knowledge, and ill-regulated enthusiasm for calm deliberate judgment, took upon themselves the task of misleading the English people, and either perished amidst the ruin they had caused, or sank back into their pristine obscurity. There is a favourite cant phrase very current just now, to the effect that "we are living in new times." The same thing might have been said by our common progenitor Adam, the day after his expulsion from Paradise. It is the most trite truth of the world. Every new day brings its change, but every new day does not obliterate the memory of those which have gone before. All the "new times" which this universe has seen, have not sufficed to alter in the slightest iota the original character of mankind. Human nature still remains the same; and the man who does not acknowledge and adopt this as a principle, is a crazed and dangerous visionary. Never, under any circumstances, ought such a one to gain ascendancy in the state, or to be allowed to reduce his unsound theories to practice. If he does so, woe be to the country which countenances him in the rash attempt!

History and its philosophy are the true studies for a statesman in every age. In that educational point of view, we strongly suspect that the present ministerial cabinet is sorely deficient. The Whigs, as a body, are conversant with a very small space of history indeed. They are constantly jabbering about the fundamental principles of the constitution, which they date back no further than the advent of William of Orange. Their pet historian, and the ablest man among them, cannot make a single speech without dragging in, neck and heels, some vapidity about the Revolution Settlement of 1688; and they try to be profound in their criticisms upon the policy of Walpole and of Bute. Charles James Fox, of course, still continues to be their principal fetish, and they cling to antiquated party toasts with a superstition that would disgrace a Mussulman. But of the freer and bolder regions of history – of all that is great and elevating – of the numerous lessons to be gleaned, and the examples to be gathered from the grand old records of kingly and loyal England, or of the fall and fate of nations through the imbecility of their rulers, or the ambition of ignorant demagogues, they either know nothing practically, or they fail to acknowledge their importance. Whiggery is a small machine which works according to conventional rules of its own, and will not make allowance for the great springs of human action. A cabinet of Whigs is admirably adapted for the control and legislation of the sovereign state of Pumpfernickel, or some analogous German principality; but they never can assume their place at the helm of affairs in a great empire such as that of Britain, without landing the whole of us in dangerous difficulties, and sneaking off at the last hour under a humiliating sense of their own impotence and presumption.

The case is still worse when men like Mr Cobden come forward to try their hand either as pilots or as coadjutors. We presume that Mr Cobden, if the question were put to him, would candidly admit the narrowness of the range of his peculiar historical studies. We understand that he does not pretend to be a scholar, and that the amount, of the information which he possesses, however great that may be, is limited to modern facts and premises, upon which he usually reasons. A worse kind of education for a statesman, or for the leader of a popular movement, cannot be found than this. It was this kind of partial knowledge, unilluminated by the clear lucid light which bygone history alone can shed authoritatively upon passing events, which, in the recollection of many still alive, led to the dark catastrophe and horrors of the French Revolution. There is hardly one social change, hardly one political experiment now making, for which a prototype cannot be furnished from the pages of history. And of what possible use, it may be well asked, is history, if we are not to recur to it for a solution of the difficulties which may arise in our onward progress? Are we to gain no confidence, nor take any warning from the rise and decline of nations, not much less powerful than our own, whose checkered career and the causes of it are open to our view? Is the world behind us a blank, that we should go stumbling on at the instigation of every reckless adventurer, more culpable in his attempts to guide us, than the ship-captain who should presume to thread the coral reefs of the Indian Ocean without consulting the authoritative chart? Are we always to derive our information, not from what has been done and acted in the globe before – not from an attentive examination of men and their motives, and the countless springs of action which stir them, but from statistical tables and long columns of figures, compiled by rusty officials in their dens, and brought forth for the first time to be cited as overwhelming testimony by some premier who is meditating apostasy, or seeking some palliative to cover his shameful abandonment of a party? The features of the so-called statesmanship of the present day are essentially those of bureaucracy. A drudging arithmetical clerk, with whom a unit is every thing, and who would be nearly driven to despair by the discovery of a misquoted fraction, is a leading authority with our statesmen; and his vamped-up tables of export and import are considered sounder expositions of the destinies of the human race, than all the accumulated wisdom, learning, and experience which the annals of the world can afford.