XXXVIIL] VIEWS ON OULTUER. 043

little unjust, but the point of his good-humonred sarcasm
has been much misrepresented. He was, he said in his
last speech, a great advocate of culture of every kind, What
he sought was that young men should be led to add to
classical learning a great knowledge of modern affairs and
the habits of serious political thought about their own time.

their whole country desolated by Spanish troops, and every town lighted up
daily with the fires of persecution,—when I see the accounts of what passed
when the envoys ceme to Queen Elizabeth and asked for aid, how she is
huckstering for money while they are begging for help to their religion,
I declare that, with all my principles of non-intervention, I am almost
ashamed of old Queen Bess. And then there were Burleigh, Walsingham,
and the rest, who were, if possible, harder and more difficult to deal with
than their mistress. Why, they carried out in its unvarnished selfishness
a national British policy ; they had no other idea of a policy but & national
British policy, and they carried it out with & degree of selfishness amounting
to downright: avarice.
“ He next quotes Chatham. Do you suppose that Chatham was running
about the world protecting and looking after other people’s affairs P Why,
he went abroad in the spirit of a commercial traveller more than any
Minister we over had. . . . . At that time, Lord Chatham thought, that by
making war upon France and seizing the Canadas, he was bringing custom
to the English merchants and mananfacturers ; and he publicly declared that
he made those conquests for the very purpose of giving & monopoly of those
ponquersd markets to Englishmen at home ; and he said he would not allow
the colonists to manufacture a horseshoe for themselves. . . . . Now, if 1
take Chatham’s great son ; if I take the second Pitt, when he entered upon
ward he immediately began the conguest of colonies. When he entered upon
war with France in 1793, and for three or four years afterwards, our navy
was employed in little else than seizing oolonies, the islands of the West
Indies, &e., whether they belonged to France, Holland, or Denmark, or
other nations, and he believed by that means he could make war profitable.
~—Spesches, ii. 850, 851.
¢ The passage was prompted by a little slip in a leading article in the
Times, which had made one of the greatest of American rivers run uphill a
great number of miles into another river, and then these two united (the
waters of which are never blended at all) were made to flow into a third
river, into which, as it happens, neither of them pours a drop. How preposterons,
 said Cobden, that young gentlemen who know all about the
geography of ancient Greece, should be unable, if asked to point out
Chicago on the map, to go within a thousand miles of it. “When I was ab
Athens,” he said, “I sallied out one summer morning to see the far-famed
river, the Ilyssus, and after walking for some hundred yards wp what
appeared to be the bed of a winter torrent, I came up to a number of
Athenian laundresses, and I found they had dammed up this far-famed