08

Li¥E UF OOBDEN,

fous?

1835-6. sity of admitting bankers and merchants to a share of th
sz. 31-2. political dignity which had hitherto been confined to tH
great families. It had now ceased to be a question of °
few peerages more or less for Lombard Street or Cornhill
Commercial interests no less than territorial interests Wer
now overshadowed by industrial interests; the new diff
culties, the new problems, the new perils, all sprang fro?
what had taken place since William Pitt’s time, the porte?
tous expansion of our industrial system. Between the date o
Waterloo and the date of the Reform Act, the power-loo®
in Manchester had increased from two thousand to eight/
thousand, and the population of Birmingham had gro®
from ninety to one hundred and fifty thousand. The sa®
wonders had come to pass in enormous districts over tb
land.
Cobden was naturally led to begin his survey of society’
as such a survey is always begun by the only kind of
historian that is worth reading. He looked to wealth and
its distribution, to material well-being, to economic
sources, to their administration, to the varying directi?®
and relative force of their currents. It was here that b¢
found the key to the stability and happiness of a natio®
in the sense in which stability and happiness are the object?
of its statesmen. He declined to make any excuse for ®
frequently resolving questions of state policy into matters o
pecuniary calculation, and he delighted in such business-li¥¢
statements as that the cost of the Mediterranean squadro®
in proportion to the amount of the trade which it was pr’
fessedly employed to protect, was as though a merchavt
should find that his traveller’s expenses for escort alo®
were to amount to 6s. 8d. in the pound on his sales. Be
pointed to the examples in history, where some of t
greatest and most revolutionary changes in the mode”
world had a fiscal or economic origin. And if Cobden b#'