feel a

PROMOTION IN BUSINESS.

5

The same year which struck Cobden this distressing bibrought
 him promotion in his business. The early dif.
°nces between himself and his uncle had been smoothed
%way by his industry, cheerfulness, and skill, and he had
Won the approval and good-will of his employers. From the
drudgery of the warehouse, he was now advanced to the
glories of the road. We may smile at the keen elation with
which he looked to this preferment from the position of
clerk to that of traveller; but human dignities are only
relative, and a rise in the hierarchy of trade is doubtless as
good matter for exultation, as a rise in hierarchies more
slaborately robed. Cobden’s new position was peculiarly
Suited to the turn of his character. Collecting accounts and
Soliciting orders for muslins and calicoes gave room in their
humble sphere for those high inborn qualities of energy,
and sociability, which in later years produced the most
active and the most persuasive of popular statesmen. But
What made the life of a traveller so specially welcome to
Cobden, was the gratification that it offered to the master-Passion
 of his life, an insatiable desire to know the affairs
of the world. Famous men, who became his friends in the
years to coms, agree in the admission that they have never
known a man in whom this trait of a sound and rational
desire to know and to learn was so strong and so inexhaustible,
 It was not the curiosity of the infantile dabbler
in all subjects, random and superficial ; and yet it was as
far removed from the dry parade of the mere tabulist and
Statistician. It was not bookish, for Cobden always felt
that much of what is best worth knowing is never written
in hooks, Nor was it the curiosity of a speculative under-Standing
 ; yet, as we shall see presently, there soon grew
p in his mind a body of theoretic principles, and a philo-Sophie
 conception of modern society, round which the knowledge
 so strenuously sought was habitually grouped, and

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