MR. COBDEN’S MOTION FOR REDUCING THE ARMY AND NAVY.
The Whigs were not good financiers. Sir Robert Peel excelled his contemporaries, and more especially his opponents, in the practicability of his financial arrangements. The government had been placed in circumstances of great difficulty by events purely of a providential nature; but there existed a general impression that they did not meet the emergency with skill. A society called the Financial Reform Association grew into existence in consequence of this feeling. Its head-quarters was at Liverpool. Many important facts were brought to light by it, and much information extended, but there was a want of tact in the management which defeated these laudable and enlightened exertions. The society had a singular fatality for urging particular measures precisely at the juncture when there was least likelihood of gaining the ear of either the public or the legislature. Mr. Cobden made himself conspicuous in this agitation, and began that career of impracticability which gradually limited his public usefulness, and at last expelled him from parliament. When the whig budget came on for discussion, Mr. Cobden was agitating a scheme for returning to the expenditure of 1835, by which he alleged ten millions annually would have been saved. The state of Ireland and the continent rendered it unlikely that the country would consent to any very great reduction in its military and naval defences, yet it was in these departments Mr. Cobden contemplated his economical experiments. On the 26th of February he submitted a motion to the house embodying the principles for which he had contended at public meetings. The chancellor of the exchequer showed that no reductions which even Mr. Cobden himself dare submit to the house would reduce the national expenditure to the proposed extent, and proved that the defence of the commerce and independence of the country forbade any such reduction. Mr. Cobden only obtained seventy-seven to support him, in a house of three hundred and fifty-three members. This did not arise from any indisposition to reduce the public burdens, but from a conviction that Mr. Cobden rested his motion upon false data, and that his scheme was utterly inapplicable to the circumstances of the times.