xxxviL] HIS CONTRIBUTION Y0 SOCIAL REFORM. 945
made, and his energy naturally incites him to try to make
ib. Cobden was penetrating, energetic, and sanguine. The
records of unfortunate commerce,” as Mr. Bagehot said,
‘“ abound in instances of men who have been unsuccessful,
because they had great mind, great energy, and great hope,
but had not money in proportion.”

One obvious criticism on Cobden’s work, and it has
often been made, is that he was expecting the arrival of a
great social reform from the mere increase and more equal
distribution of materiai wealth. He ought to have known,
they say, that what our society needs is the diffusion of
intellectual light and the fire of a higher morality. It is
even said by some that Free Trade has done harm rather
than good, because it has flooded the country with wealth
which men have never been properly taught how to use.
[n other words, material progress has been out of all proportion
 to moral progress.
Now nobody had better reason to know this than Cobden.
The perpetual chagrin of his life was the obstinate refusal of
those on whom he had helped to shower wealth and plenty
to hear what he had to say on the social ideals to which their
wealth should lead. At last he was obliged to say to himself,
 as he wrote to a friend: “Nations have not yet learnt
to bear prosperity, liberty, and peace. They will learn it in
a higher state of civilization. We think we are the models
for posterity, when we are little better than beacons to help
it to avoid the rocks and quicksands.”
“ When I come here,” he wrote to Mr. Hargreaves from
Dunford, ‘to ramble alone in the fields and to think, I am
impressed with the aspect of our political and social relations.
We have the spirit of feudalism rife and rampant in the

¢ Bagehot’s Literary Studies, vol. i, 373—a passage as applicable to Cobden
AS to Mr. Wilson, about whom it is written.

3}