CHAPTER wr

THE FOUNDATION OF THE LEAGTR

1828. Tyr French economist who recounted to his countrymen
Ar. 34, the history of the great agitation in which Cobden now
gradually rose to a foremost place, justly pointed out that
the name and title of the Anti-Corn-Law League gave to
foreigners a narrow and inadequate idea of its scope, its
depth, and its animating spirit. What Bastiat thus said
with regard to foreigners, is just as true with regard to ourselves
 of a loter generation. We too are as apt as French
men or {fermans to think narrowly and inadequately of the
scope and animating spirit of this celebrated confederation.
Yet the interest of that astonishing record of zeal, tact,
devotion, and courage, into some portions of which the
biographer of Cobden bos now to enter, lies principally for
us in the circumstance that the abolition of the protective
duties on food and the shattering of the protective system
was, on one side, the beginning of our great modern struggle
against class preponderance at home, and on another side,
the dawn of higher ideals of civilization all over the world.
It was not of himself assuredly that; Cobden was speaking,
when at the moment of the agitation reaching its height, he
confessed that when it first began they bad not all possessed
the same comprehensive view of the interests and objects
involved, that cae to thom later. “I am afraid,” ha suid,