104

LIFE OF COBDEN, [oma?

1835-6. to take care of themselves. For, says the writer, no Power
Hr. 31.2. is practically under this obligation, unless its perception o
the wrong that has been done is reinforced by a =ense of
its own interests.’ Then it is the self-interest of each
nation which is the decisive element in every case of inter
vention, and not a general doctrine about the balance of
power, or an alleged common usage of protecting the weak
against the strong? But that is exactly what Cobden
started from. His premise was that “no government ha?
the right to plunge its people into hostilities, except iB
defence of their own honour and interests.” There would
seem then to be no difference of principle between the
military and the commercial schools of foreign policy. The
trader from Manchester and the soldier from Aldershot or
Woolwich, without touching the insoluble, because only half
intelligible, problem of the balance of power, may agree to
discuss the propriety of a given war on the solid ground of
national self-interest. Each will be affected by professional
bias, so that one of them will be apt to believe that our
self-interest is touched at a point which the other will consider
 too remote to concern us; but neither can claim any
advantage over the other as the disinterested champion of
public law and the rights of Europe. If there is a difference
deeper than this, it must be that the soldier or the diplomatist
 of the old school has really in his mind a set of
opinions as to the ends for which a nation exists, and as to
the relations of class-interests to one another, of such #
colour that no serious politician in modern times would
venture openly to avow them.
If the two theories of the duty of a nation in regard to
war are examined in this way, we see how unreasonable it
is that Cobden’s theory of non-intervention should be called
selfish by those who would be ashamed to base an opposite
3 Kinglake, vol. i. ch. ii.