£28

TAR
LiFZ OF COBDEN. {¢

855. It is quite clear, according to the writer, that tho
dir. 51. must have been a mistake in the record of Christ's preach:
ing. It was war, not peace, he left for a legacy to Ma™
Hew could he possibly bring peace into the world to corp!
and degrade it? It is enthroning the devil in the place of
tho God of mercy, truth, love, and justice; for what bas
war to do with these ?
“August 8,1855.— . . . . Ipaid a visit on Wednesday *
my neighbour the Bishop of Oxford, and met Lord Aberdeels
Roundell Palmer, and some others. The old Harl W&°
even more emphatic than at the same place a year 88°
in lamenting to me that he had suffered himself to P¢
drawn into the Russian war. He declared that he ought
to have resigned.! Speaking of the authors of hie
policy he said, ‘It was not the Parliamont or the public;
but the Press that forced the Government into the Wor:
The public mind was not ab first in an uncontrollable
state, but it was made so by the Press’ He might have
added that —— had something to do with it. I really
could not help pitying the old gentleman, for he was iz
unenviable state of mind, and yet I doubt if there be a mor¢
reprehensible human act than to lead a nation into an "¥
necessary war, as Walpole, North, Pitt, and Aberdeen hav?
done, against their own conviction and at the dictation o
others, , . . »

forth. The singular implication of the poet ie that the best way to resol
the poor from being hoveil’d and hustled together, each sex, like swine,”
bo cultivate “the blood-red blossom of war.” Unluckily war sanrot g0 ©°
without taxes, and taxes in the long-run in a thousand Ways squravate the
hovelling and hustling of the poor, as the state of the labourers after t¢
war of Cobden’s youth showed. That a man of Mr. Tennyson's genic
should have been so led astray, only illustrates the roaming folly of 108°
two years.
! Sir James Graham in ‘the same way said to Mr. Bright: «Yon wer?
entirely right about that war; we were entirely wrong, and we neve
should have gone into it.” Bright's Speeches, i. 192. “This war,” wrote
Sir George C. Lewis, who joined the Palmerston Government afar HE