circumstances of his own day before him, he considered that it was
"natural" for Great Britain to manufacture for the world in exchange for
her free admission of the more "natural" agricultural products of other
countries. He advocated the repeal of the corn-laws, not essentially in
order to make food cheaper, but because it would develop industry and
enable the manufacturers to get labour at low but sufficient wages; and
he assumed that other countries would be unable to compete with England
in manufactures under free trade, at the prices which would be possible
for English manufactured products. "We advocate," he said, "nothing but
what is agreeable to the highest behests of Christianity--to buy in the
cheapest market, and sell in the dearest." He believed that the rest of
the world must follow England's example: "if you abolish the corn-laws
honestly, and adopt free trade in its simplicity, there will not be a
tariff in Europe that will not be changed in less than five years"
(January 1846). His cosmopolitanism--which makes him in the modern
Imperialist's eyes a "Little Englander" of the straitest sect--led him
to deplore any survival of the colonial system and to hail the removal
of ties which bound the mother country to remote dependencies; but it
was, in its day, a generous and sincere reaction against popular
sentiment, and Cobden was at all events an outspoken advocate of an
irresistible British navy. There were enough inconsistencies in his
creed to enable both sides in the recent controversies to claim him as
one who if he were still alive would have supported their case in the
altered circumstances; but, from the biographical point of view, these
issues are hardly relevant. Cobden inevitably stands for "Cobdenism,"
which is a creed largely developed by the modern free-trader in the
course of subsequent years. It becomes equivalent to economic
_laisser-faire_ and "Manchesterism," and as such it must fight its own
corner with those who now take into consideration many national factors
which had no place in the early utilitarian individualistic regime of
Cobden's own day.

The standard biography is that by John Morley (1881). Cobden's
speeches were collected and published in 1870. The centenary of his
birth in 1904 was celebrated by a flood of articles in the newspapers
and magazines, naturally coloured by the new controversy in England
over the Tariff Reform movement.

COBET, CAREL GABRIEL (18