v.]

THE

"ROBLEM.

97

“ Far from nourishing any such esprit-de-corps,” he says in unr,
the first pamphlet, “our predilections lean altogether in &r. 31-2.
an opposite direction. We were born and bred up amid
the pastoral charms of the south of England, and we confess
to 80 much attachment for the pursuits of our forefathers,
that, had we the casting of the parts of all the actors in
this world’s stage, we do not think we should suffer a
cotton-mill or a manufactory to have a place init. . . . But
the factory system, which sprang from the discoveries in
machinery, has been adopted by all the civilized nations in
the world, and it is in vain for us to think of discountenancing
 its application to the necessities of this country ; it
only remains for us to mitigate, as far as possible, the evils
shat are perhaps not inseparably connected with this novel
jocial element,”
To this conception of the new problem Cobden always
kept very close. This was always to him the foundation
of the new order of things, which demanded a new kind of
statesmanship and new ideas upon national policy, Tt is
true that Cobden sometimes slips into the phrases of an
older school, about the rights of man and natural law, but
such lapses into the dialect of a revolutionary philosophy
were very rare, and they were accidents, His whole
scheme rested, if ever any scheme did so rest, upon the
wide positive base of a great social expediency. To political
exclusion, to commercial monopoly and restriction, to the preponderance
 of a territorial aristocracy in the legislature, he
steadfastly opposed the contention that they were all fatally
incompatible with an industrial system, which it was beyond
the power of any statesman or any order in the country to
choose between accepting and casting out.
Fifty years before this, the Younger Pitt, when he said
that any man with twenty thousand pounds a year ought
“0 he wade a peer if he wished, had recognized the neces.