¥xx1v.] PROPOSED CHANGES IN MARITIME LAW. 839
Famine in Lancashire, caused by the blockade of the 1862
Southern ports of the United States, gave to these views a ir. 58.
painful appositeness, and Cobden pressed the arguments
of his letter to Mr. Ashworth still more forcibly and with a
greater breadth of illustration in an address to the Manchester
 Chamber of Commerce in the autumn of the same
Year,*
In the course of 1862 Cobden made one of his most determined
 and systematic onslaughts upon Lord Palmerston’s
policy of national defence. He carried on very effective skirmishing
 during the session, until at the close of it (Aug. 1), as
Bn eye-witness describes it, they engaged in a regular single
combat.* The House was thin, the conclusion was foregone,
and no effect followed from Cobden’s undaunted perseverance.
Perhaps more was done by a pamphlet which he published
earlier in the same year, The Three Panics, & strenuous and
humiliating narrative of the incoherent alarms of invasion
which had seized successive Governments in 1848, in 1853,
and in 1862° Mr. Gladstone thought that the narrative
laid more than the full share of blame upon Governments

8 Speeches, ii. 279. Oct. 25, 1862.
4 «There they stood,” said Mr. Grant Duff, * unreconciled and irreconsilable—
 the representatives of two widely different epochs, and of two widely
different types of English life. The one trained in the elegant but superficial
tultare which was usual among the young men of his position in life at the
beginning of this century, full of pluck, full of intelligence, but disinclined,
alike by the character of his mind and by the habit of official life from
indulging in political speculation, or pursuing long trains of thought; yet
yielding to no man in application, in the quickness of his judgment, in knowledge
 of a statesman’s business, and in the power of enlisting the support of
what has been truly called that floating mass which in all countries and all
bime has always decided all questions.’ The other derived from nature finer
powers of mind, but many years passed away before he could employ his great
abilities in a field sufficiently wide for them. There he stood, an admirable
representative of the best section of the class to which he belongs, full of
large and philanthropio hopes, and full of confidence in his power to realize
them,” &c, Mr. Grant Duft’s Elgin Speeches, p. 25.—See his Speeches, ii. 267.
¢ Collected Writings, vol ii.