the ministers at the head of the
great departments of expenditure their duty of devising plans of
reduction, but he boldly urged the reconsideration of such large general
items of charge as the military expenditure in the colonies, then standing
at an annual burden of over two millions on the taxpayers of this country.
He was keen from the lessons of experience, to expose the ever
indestructible fallacy that mighty armaments make for peace.

Still the cabinet was not moved, and in Palmerston he found a will and
purpose as tenacious as his own. "The interview with Lord Palmerston came
off to-day," he writes to the Duke of Argyll (June 6, 1860). "Nothing
could be more kind and frank than his manner. The _matter_ was first to
warn me of the evils and hazards attending, for me, the operation of
resigning. Secondly, to express his own strong sense of the obligation to
persevere. Both of these I told him I could fully understand. He said he
had had two great objects always before him in life--one the suppression of
the slave trade, the other to put England in a state of defence. In short,
it appears that he now sees, as he considers, the opportunity of attaining
a long cherished object; and it is not unnatural that he should repel any
proposal which should defraud him of a glory, in and by absolving him from
a duty.... I am now sure that Lord Palmerston entertained this purpose
when he formed the government; but had I been in the slightest degree
aware of it, I should certainly, but very reluctantly, have abstained from
joining it, and helped, as I could, from another bench its Italian
purposes. Still, I am far indeed from regretting to have joined it, which
is quite another matter."

Now labouring hard in Paris month after month at the tariff, Cobden plied
Mr. Gladstone with exhortations to challenge the alarmists on the facts;
to compare the outlay by France for a dozen years past on docks,
fortifications, arsenals, with the corresponding outlay by England; to
show that our steam navy, building and afloat, to say nothing of our vast
mercantile marine, was at least double the strength of France; and above
all, to make his colleagues consider whether the French Emperor had not,
as a matter of self-interest, made the friendship of England, from the
first, the hinge of his whole policy. Cobden, as always, knew thoroughly
and in detail what he was talking about, for he had sat for three
successive sessions on a select committee