1859.
Ar. 55.

700

LIFE 0" QOEDEN. [om xxv]

justified in disclaiming all personal feeling about Liord
Palmerston, but his repugnance to the sentiments, traditions
and methods of which Palmerston was the representative;
was the deepest part of his nature, and it was ineradlcable.
 The instinct was surely sound which told him thet
something would be lost to the integrity of his political
character and conscience, if he allowed the seeming expe
diency of the hour to tempt him into an alliance with &
system that he had always denounced, and with men who had
all their lives been committed to it heart and soul, Other
people would in the long run have felt the same thing about
him. The moral influence of character is the most delicate
of all forces. It in affected by subtle and almost impercepbible
 agencies, of which logic is far too rough an instrument
to take any account. The idea which men had, and still
have, of Cobden’s simplicity, independence, and conviction,
would inevitably have been tarnished if he had accepted 8
post under one, to whom the beliefs and the language of #
lifetime made him the typical antagonist,
This was what was in Cobden’s mind when he said, “I
have a horror of losing my individuality, which is to me 88
existence itself.” His position in the League had shown
that nobody was less open than he to the charge of inability
bo act with others,—that fatal sign of mediocre capacity.
But a more fatal sign of a worse moral mediocrity is the
ability to act with the first comer. Cobden was of all men
the most staunch and most flexible member of an alliance,
but he was scrupulously careful in choosing who his allies
should be. He was right in thinking that he should not
find one after his own heart either in Lord Palmerston, or
among many of the colleagues with whom Palmerston was
likely to provide him,