ideal, the philosophy of pig-wash, as Carlyle, in some of his most scornful sentences, called it. The author of Past and Present was one of those who altogether declined to believe that the competitive theory was in accordance with his favourite Eternal Verities. One thing,' he says, 'I do know: never on this earth was the relation of man to man long carried on by cash payment alone. If at any time a philosophy of Laisser-faire, Competition, and Supply-and-demand, start up as the exponent of human relations, expect that it will soon end.'" It was the theory of which it has been said that it regarded men and women as if they were algebraical symbols of at best featherless two-legged animals provided only with a stomach and a pocket.' The rise of modern Conservatism is largely the revolt against this soulless and lifeless doctrine. If it can be said it has gone hand in hand with the rise of Socialism, it must also be admitted that Socialism itself is in some sort a similar revolt, and that the mischievous lengths to which it attempts to push the action of the State have been provoked by the individualistic extravagance which almost refused to permit the State to exercise any ethical functions at all. No doubt the modern Cobdenite, though still all for unlimited Free-trade and unlimited competition, is not, as a rule, anxious to pose as a cosmopolitan and a peace-at-any-price man. He rather prefers to disclaim this doctrine as a mere personal idiosyncrasy on the part of the founder of this faith. But here Cobden was more consistent than some of his successors. His refusal to recognise national ideals was in accordance with the general tendency of his teaching and that of his sect. When Tennyson's Maud appeared at the outbreak of the Crimean War, he had nothing but condemnation for the poem, and he thought the article in the Athenæum praising it merely atrocious.' 8 War was a nuisance because it was bad for trade. The ideal of a nation of shopkeepers could not be realised except in a state of peace: Peace sitting under her olive, and slurring the days gone by, When the poor are hovelled and hustled together, each sex, like swine; Peace in her Vineyard-yes! but a company forges the wine. Similarly Cobden had the feeblest belief in the greatness or stability of the British Empire. He was sanguine enough, sometimes, as everybody knows-in fact, absurdly optimistic in his prophecies as 7 Carlyle, Past and Present, book iii. ch. x. • It is worth noticing that Mr. Morley at any rate is so far faithful to the teaching of his master that he considers the politics of Maud barbarous, though he is too good a critic not to admit that the poetry is beautiful. (See Morley's Life of Cobden, Jubilee edition, vol. ii. p. 173.) regards the industrial future and the speedy triumph of his economic tenets. To imagine that all the nations of the earth would recognise the merits of enlightened self-interest' and regulate their external and internal dealings according to the standard of Manchester middleclass morality caused him no difficulty. But this sanguine temper disappeared when he came to deal with Imperial politics. Here his want of faith contrasts curiously with his optimism in economic matters. When the Indian Mutiny broke out he was at once convinced that the only policy before us was that of Scuttle. 'I am, and always have been, of opinion that we have attempted an impossibility in giving ourselves to the task of governing a hundred millions of Asiatics. God and his visible and natural laws have passed insuperable obstacles to the success of such a scheme;' and in any case, he asks characteristically, 'what advantage can it confer on ourselves?' What profit should we make out of it? As for the Colonies, he regarded them as a mere encumbrance, which we ought to be rid of as speedily as possible. When the British North America Act was first mooted, he could see no benefit in it because it held out no hope of relieving us from the expense and risk of defending the Colony from the United States- a task, by the way,' he explains, which everybody admits to be beyond our power.' If he had lived to the present year he would have discovered that a great many people, including the entire population of the Dominion of Canada, admit nothing of the sort. But Cobden adds that he cannot see what substantial interest the British people have in this Canadian connection to compensate them for guaranteeing three or four millions of North Americans living in Canada against another community of Americans living in their neighbourhood. Hardly anybody now, except Mr. Goldwin Smith, who, after all, is chiefly interesting as a belated survival from the Benthamite era, talks like this. It is worth while comparing these humiliating words of Cobden with a passage in Carlyle's Latter-day Pamphlets, in which he exhorts us by no means to induce the Colonies to break away from us. Colonies, as he reminds us, are not to be picked off the street every day. Not a colony of them but has been too dearly purchased by the toil and blood of those we have the honour to be sons of; and we cannot just afford to put them away because McCroudy finds the present management of them costs money. Because the accounts do not stand well in the ledger, our remedy is not to take shame to ourselves, and repent in sackcloth and ashes, and amend our beggarly imbecilities and insincerities in that as in other departments of our business, but to fling the business overboard and declare the business itself to be bad? We are a hopeful set of heirs to a big fortune!'9 6 It must be conceded that Cobden had no more confidence in the future and the magnanimity of other nations than in those of his own. • Latter-day Pamphlets, No. IV. While the United States was engaged in its desperate struggle with sedition and rebellion, Mr. Cobden was one of those Englishmen who believed, with Mr. Gladstone, that the South had made a nation. 'I cannot see my way,' he writes, 'through the American business. do not believe the North and South can ever lie in the same bed again, nor do I see how the military operations can be carried into the South so as to inflict a crushing defeat.' 10 The notion that a people would go on fighting for abstract ideas, until a million or so of them had been killed off, and win in the end, failed to fit in with the Cobdenite scheme of human nature. And undoubtedly it is a little difficult for those who believe in Enlightened Selfishness as the mainspring of human action to understand why a man should go and get himself killed in vindication of a thing so intangible as the Constitution, and so unmarketable as the Flag. One may repudiate Cobdenism without any intention to assail or undervalue the personal character of the leading Cobdenites. Most of them were in many respects highly estimable men; and Cobden himself had a large share of the qualities which Englishmen rightly reverence. He was upright, honourable, and disinterested; kindly and affectionate in his private life; an excellent father, husband, and brother; sedulous in his work, simple in his habits, pleasantly free from ostentation and self-seeking ambition; and no one can question his courage, or the conscientious industry and self-sacrificing energy, with which he served the cause of humanity, according to his lights. Many of his best qualities were shared by the other members of the group with which he was associated, and by his forerunners and successors. Earnestness, sincerity, and an unselfish zeal for the propagation of truth have been characteristic of the leaders of Economic Liberalism-of Adam Smith, Bentham, Ricardo, the Mills, Grote, Molesworth, and John Bright, to come no later. If they preached the Gospel of Self, it was assuredly not because they were personally more selfish than their neighbours; if their economics were 'un-moral,' it was not because they were otherwise than moral themselves. But the fact is their perverted ethics were largely due to the oddly theoretical character of the economical doctrine which inspired them. They prided themselves on being above all things 'practical men ;' but the practical man (do we not see it every day?), myopic from much bending over blue-lined ledgers, often discerns the realities of life more dimly than the philosopher who looks at the world through his study windows. Our free-contract Radicals forgot that their political economy was after all the merest a priori speculation. It is true their earlier doctors and preachers did not pretend that it was anything else. Adam Smith, for instance, and his masters, Quesnay and Turgot, described what might happen under purely 10 Morley, Life of Cobden, vol. ii. p. 389. hypothetical and, as they thought, quite unrealisable, conditions, not what actually was happening, or would be at all likely to happen, in any society of which they had cognisance. The classical ' economics, which professes only to concern itself with tendencies and generalities, could be as unmoral and as doctrinaire as it pleased. It dealt with imaginary capitalists paying fictitious wages to unreal workmen ; with shadowy landlords drawing impossible rents from unsubstantial acres tilled by visionary tenants; with a kingdom of Cockayne, peopled by moral monsters. Eye hath not seen the creatures who inhabit the 'orthodox' economists' fairy-land-the Consumer who is all stomach, the Labourer who is nothing but a hand and a pair of seven-leagued boots (wherewith he may 'transfer' himself from China to Peru even as Capital calls him), and the rest. They are phantasms of the speculative brain-mere types and symbols and algebraical x's and y's to do economic sums with, as indeed the more candid of their creators confess. Professor Walker, the great (and far from 'orthodox') American economist, has pointed out that competition, as the regulator of all production and exchange, will only work effectively if it is 'perfect;' and perfect competition means not only that there must be no interference with wages, prices, hours of labour, and the like by Government, but also that in buying and selling no question of sentiment, patriotism, national policy, friendship, custom, vanity, or tradition should arise. But that is only to say that 'perfect competition' cannot possibly exist anywhere but in the green Utopia of the Economic Cloudland; it is too perfect for this grey imperfect earth. Now all this dealing in abstractions and hypotheses would not matter if it were confined to the professors, who, of course, know what the limitations of their science are. But a variety of circumstances caused it to be taken up by a large number of Englishmen without any limitations at all. Good men themselves, they pushed the competitive ideal, derived from the works of their theorists, to dangerous and immoral lengths. Fortunately for society, the movement had hardly set fairly in before the reaction came, and the larger part of our recent legislation has been shaped in direct antagonism to the principle of laisser-faire. Free-trade is only one application of that principle, and it took the firmest hold because it happened to be particularly well suited to the circumstances of a country, which only wanted to get its raw materials cheap in order that it might sell its manufactured goods where it pleased, and could ask its own price for them. Buying cheap and selling dear is uncommonly good policy if you are lucky enough to have almost a monopoly of a great many articles, which everybody must purchase from you because they cannot get them elsewhere. But Free-trade is no more sacred than any other part of the political creed to which it owes its origin; and if it is to maintain itself, it must show clearly that it is justified by actual results at the present time. It is not to the purpose to prove that it suited us in the 'fifties and 'forties; still less to quote Political Economy' against it, as some speakers and writers do not very honestly, since, as well-informed persons, they must know that the authorities they refer to, though they may impose on the crowd, are not now accepted unquestioningly in the schools. They are, of course, aware that there is no longer an orthodoxy in political economy; and being, as they must be, familiar with the works of Cairnes, Cliffe Leslie, Cunningham, Walker, Jevons, and Marshall, if not with those of Le Play and Roscher, they should not treat the Smithian political economy as if it were an accepted and unshaken scientific system, instead of a set of rules, generalisations, and personal opinions, some of which are still considered valuable, while others are absolutely discredited. Nothing has done more to accelerate the decline of Cobdenism among the sort of educated people who were once rather pleased to be considered 'Academic Radicals' than the extraordinary refusal of its leaders to recognise the results of modern economic thought. The world has not stood still since John Mill published his Principles of Political Economy, or even since the late Lord Sherbrooke completed the work of Peel' by his entirely unnecessary and superfluous abolition of the shilling metage duty on corn. It is possible that if Cobden were alive to-day, and face to face with the conditions of latter-day industrialism and international competition, he might be a Cobdenite no longer. It is certain that so acute an explorer of the currents of public opinion would have perceived that such projects as that of an Imperial Customs Union would have to be dealt with on their merits, political and social, as well as financial. And he would have understood that they could not be disposed of by being called 'veiled Protectionism,' or by an appeal to an economic pontificate that has lost its sanctity. SIDNEY LOW. |