612

LIFE OF OOBDEN. Jom. xxal

188%. inclined to think there is a greater effort required to face the
Zir.49. ordeal than we generally suppose.”
By the end of the year an extraordinary change had
af last taken place in the political sky, which Cobden
described in his characteristic style years afterwards
“Let us suppose an invalid,” he said, “to have been
ordered, for the benefit of his health, to make the voyage
bo Australia and back. He lefs England in the month
of February or March. The militia was preparing for
duty; the coasts and dockyards were being fortified;
the navy, army, and artillery were all in course Of
augmentation ; inspectors of artillery and cavalry were
reported to be busy on the southern coast; deputations
from railway companies, it was said, had been waiting or
the Admiralty and Ordnance, to explain how rapidly the
commissariat and military stores could be transported from
the Tower to Dover or Portsmouth; and the latest pars”
graph of news from the Continent was that our neighbours
on the other side of the Channel were practising the embarkation
 and disembarkation of troops by night. He left
home amidst all these alarms and preparations for a French
invasion. - After an absence of four or five months, during
which time he had no opportunity of hearing more recent
news from Europe, he steps on shore at Liverpool, and the
first newspaper he sees informs him that the English and
French flects are lying side by side in Besika Bay. AD
impending naval engagement between the two Powers if
naturally the idea that first occurs to him; but glancing ab
the leading article of the journal, he learns that England
and France have entered into an alliance, and that they are
on the eve of commencing a sanguinary war against
Russia”

t In The Three Panics : An Historical Episode (1862): Collected Writing®
a 989