xxxvi.] COBDEN’S VIEWS ON THE LAND QUESTION. 921

none of those restrictive covenants which now so constantly
hamper the tenant in the manner of applying his capital and
carrying on his business. Perhaps he might have been
persuaded that leases themselves are found by the people
concerned to be a practical impediment to the free movement
 of capital; and in this way might have come round to
such a form of legislative Tenant Right as would give the
security of a lease without involving an inconveniently long
duration. However this may be, we have as a matter of fact
no complete scheme of Cobden’s views on the English Land
Question. His solution of the question of the same name
in Ireland, we have already seen (above pp. 28, 29, 50, 97).
He would “ give Ireland to the Irish.”
Although the few sentences which concerned a Land
League did most to startle attention at the moment, Cobden’s
 last speech dealt much more fully with other topics,
and covered a very wide space of political ground. The
exhaustion after such an effort was severe. “I should
have been well enough,” Cobden told Mr. Paulton, «if I
could have gone to bed for four and twenty hours after
the speech. But the next day Mr. Kemp had a reception
of two hundred of the leading Liberals, and I spent the
whole evening in shaking hands and incessant talking to
relays of friends.” The journey home made things worse.
He was afraid to rest in London, lest he should find himself
compelled by illness to remain there. On the whole, when
he reached home, he considered that he had escaped tolerably
 well, but he made up his mind that he must never
attend another public meeting in the winter season. As it

1864.
Ar. 60.

4 Mr. Thorold Rogers, who had many conversations with him on the subjeot,
 says that by free trade in land Cobden meant “the extension of the
principle of free exchange in all its fulness to landed estates, and the re.
moval of all restrictions on its transfer, either voluntarily, should the
owner desire to sell it, or involuntarily if the owner becomes embarrassed.”
—~Cobden and Modern Political Opinion, chap, iii. p. 89,