944

LIFE OF COBDEN.

[omar

His own industry in acquiring the knowledge that was
necessary for his purpose was enormous. His pamphlets
show his appetite for blue-books, and as with other sensible
 men it was an appetite which led him not merely t0
swallow but to digest and assimilate. He was a constant
student of Hansard, and for one who seeks for purposes of
action or controversy to make himself well versed in the
political transactions of the present century, there is BO
book so well worth the labour of ransacking. Cobden was
never afraid of labour that he thought would be useful; he
cheerfully undertook even the drudgery of translation, and
that too in a case where he did not in his heart expect tO
make any important mark on opinion.’

People have often wondered how it was that a man who
showed so remarkable a capacity for understanding public
business, should have made so little of a success of his ow
affairs. The same question might be asked of Burke and
of Pitt, both of them economists and financiers of the first
order, yet both of whom allowed their private affairs to fall
into embarrassment and ruin. One obvious answer is that
their minds were too much absorbed in public interests to
have any room left for that close attention to private interests
 which must always be required to raise a poor math
into prosperity. Cobden, it is true, deliberately attempted
material success, and did not attempt it with prudence:
The failure was in fact due to the very qualities which
made him successful in larger affairs. His penetration
shows to a man of this kind wavs in which money may be

slagsio river, and that they were using every drop of water for their linen
and such sanitary purposes. I say, why should not the young gentlemen
who are taught all about the geography of the Ilyssms know gomething
about the geography of the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the Missouri ?
Speeches, ii. 364.
T In 1858 he translated M. Chevalier’s pamphlet on Gold.