"demon rising from the Thames with an Act of Parliament in
his hands." Mr Alderman Cobden is, withal, a very ostentatious declaimer
about "great first principles;" but into the nature and the definition of
those principles he is the most abstemious of all men from entering. The
subtlety of a principle escapes the grasp of his intellect; he can deal
with it only as a material substance clear to sight and to touch, like a
common calico. Hence he talks about principles and cotton prints as if
they were convertible terms.

Such as he is, Mr Cobden, it cannot be denied, fills for the present a
large space in the public eye; and so he will continue to fill until
occult party supports are withdrawn, and, having served the turn, he is
left to the natural operation of the principles of gravitation, and to
sink to the nothingness from which he has been forced up by the political
accidents and agitation of the day. Lamentably astern in economical lore
and political knowledge as he is, and as the want of that educational
preparation upon which alone the foundation of knowledge and of principles
can be raised, has left him, Mr Cobden, it must be conceded, turns the old
rags, the cast-off clothes, of other people's crotchets to good account
popularly; he succeeds where others fail, not because he is less ignorant
but because he is more fearless. But newly come into the world, as it may
be said, with little learning from books, with understanding little
enlarged by study, and furnished only with those clap-trap generalities,
that declamatory trash, which may be gleaned from reading diligently the
Radical weekly papers, Mr Cobden boldly takes for granted that all which
is new to himself must be unknown to the older world about him. Thus he
appropriates, without scruple, because in sheer ignorance, the ideas and
discoveries, such as they are and as they seem to him, of others, his more
experienced Radical contemporaries. He plunders Daniel Hardcastle, in open
day, of his banking and currency dogmas; he fleeces Bowring before his
eyes of his one-sided Free Trade and Anti-corn-Law stock in business; nay,
he mounts Joseph Hume's well-known stalking-horse against "ships,
colonies, and commerce," (colonial,) and forthwith on to the foray. Yet he
alone remains unconscious of the spoliations patent to all the world
besides--

"Where ignorance is bliss 'tis folly to be wise."

He retails the worn-out conceits of others as new and wondrous