)oo LIFE OF COBDEN. [omar.

1863,
A, 59.

ruption. When he talked of the ¢ corrupt advantages >’ of
servility to the Government, he made an imputation which
he could not prove (as he found out when he tried to get up
& case for Parliament), and which was in fact not justified.
The conductors of the Times did not praise the friends and
nbuse the enemies of the Government, in order to have one
of their contributors sent to the Bahamas, or another made
a magistrate at Bow Street. The Times was Palmerstonian
because the country was Palmerstonian, just as by-andby
 it became Derbyite because the country seemed
Derbyite. It condemned the talk of Cobden and Mr, Bright
about the land, because the capitalists and the country
gentlemen and the great nobles were frightened out of their
senses by such talk. The conductor of a newspaper is
entirely at liberty to choose what constituency he will
attract. It pleased the Times at that day to domesticate
itself, it was said, among the aristocracy. This may have
been a very narrow and ignoble policy, but Mr. Delane had
2s much right to prefer to spend his evenings among dukes
and bishops as Cobden had to spend his among manufacburers
 and merchants. One thing he had not a right to do,
and that was to fasten upon public men propositions which
it wag his business to know that they had never made.
That the Times was wrong upon some of the greatest
questions of Cobden’s time is quite clear, How wrong it was
upon the Russian War, the China War, the American Civil
War, everybody knows. But let us be just. If the Times
was wrong, so was the country. The newspaper only said
what the directing classes of the country said. Cobden’s own
letters to his friends show as much ag this. The Times was,
in fact, the natural exponent of all those old ideas of national
policy which Cobden was bent on overthrowing. Just like
the Athenian Sophist, the newspaper taught the conventional
 prejudices of those who paid for it. It is ag if, says