He retails the worn-out conceits of others as new and wondrous discoveries of his own genius and profound meditation; and all with such a simplicity and complacency of self-satisfied conviction, that you never dream or impugning the good faith with which
——"His undoubting mind
Believed the magic wonders which he sung."
Thus has it been with him specially in the last new case of poaching on the manor of Mr Joseph Hume, whose game he unhesitatingly appropriates, disguising it only in a sauce of his own flavouring. After sundry mystical heraldings forth, at various public meetings, of a mighty state secret for the cure of all state ills, which was labouring for vent in the swelling breast of Mr Alderman Cobden, M.P., the hour of parturition at length arrived; he was—after the one or two hours' agonies of a speech delivered in the for ever memorable day of June 22, 1843—delivered of the mare's nest so miraculously conceived. Here is the bantling bodily, stripped of all the swaddling-clothes of surplus verbiage in which it was enveloped on entering the world of Westminster—resolved, "That, in the opinion of this house, it is not expedient that, in addition to the great expense to which the people of this country are subject for the civil, military, and naval establishments of the colonies, they should be compelled to pay a higher price for the productions of those colonies than that at which similar commodities could be procured from other countries, and that therefore all protective duties in favour of colonial produce ought to be abolished." Our "colonial system" was denounced by this colonial Draco as "one of unmixed evil; … there was no subject upon which there was greater misapprehension than this … the new facts he should lay before the house would, no doubt, prove his position." Happy the legislature illumined with the infusion of Cobden's Bude light; thrice blest the people, both inside and outside of the house, amongst whom, all alike, "a great deal of misapprehension upon this point prevailed," whose darkness was about to be discharged by the same master mind which was, and anon is, busied in the discharge of Turkey reds from cotton chintzes at Chorley print-works.
We need not remind the public, that the peculiar phrases of that disease with which the mind of Cobden is so profoundly impregnated, essentially resolve themselves into the moneymania; the leading characteristic of the mental hallucinations with which the patient is tormented, consists in the inveterate habit of reducing all argument into arithmetical quantities; of calculating the value of all truth at some standard rate per pound sterling, of what it might possibly produce as a matter of trade; of confounding syllogisms with ciphers, and lumbering all logic into pounds, shillings, and pence. With diagnostics of disease so unmistakably developed, it would only be exasperation of the symptoms to exhibit remedially in other than the peculiar form which the patient fancies for the kill-or-cure-all draught; and since he has raised the suit, of which he is the self-constituted judge, in which Cocker is pitted against the colonies, we shall even humour the conceit, and try the question with him according to the principles of law and logic, as laid down and reduced by himself into the substantial shape of a Dr. and Cr. account, balances struck in hard cash, and no mistake.
Firstly, to begin with the beginning, which Mr Cobden, with customary confusion of intellect and arrangement, shoots into the midst of his arithmetic. The worthlessness of the colonies is argued upon the figures, which show that, of the total exports of the United Kingdom, but one-third is absorbed by them, whilst two-thirds are taken by foreign markets; therefore it follows, not that the colonial trade is by 50 per cent less important than foreign, but that, relatively, it is not only of no importance at all, but, by all the amount, an absolute prejudice: such, at least, is the rule-of-three logic of the Cobden school, as, viz.:—
"They should, however, consider what the extent of their trade with the colonies was. The whole amount of their trade in 1840 was, exports £.51,000,000; out of that £.16,000,000 was exported to the colonies, including the East Indies; but not one-third of their export trade went to the colonies. Take away £.6,000,000 of this export trade that went to the East Indies, and they had £.10,000,000 of exports to set against the £.5,000,000 or £.6,000,000 annually which was voted from the pockets of the people of this country to support these colonies."
We shall come in season meet to the five or six millions sterling said to be voted annually "to support the colonies." Now, admitting that the sixteen millions, as stated, of exports colonial do contrast unfavourably with the thirty-five millions of foreign, and that by all the difference, by more than the difference, colonial trade is disparaged in its importance, what becomes of this arithmetical illustration of the superiority of foreign trade, when by the same standard we come to measure it against the home trade, scarcely less a subject of depreciation and vituperation than the colonial, with thinkers of the same impenetrable, if not profound class as the member for Stockport? Here, for his edification, we consign the resulting figures from the standard set up by himself, as they may be found calculated and resolved from minute detail into grand totals in the "General Statistics of the British Empire," by Mr James Macqueen, an authority, perhaps, who will not be questioned by competent judges any where without the pale of the Draconian legislators of the Anti-corn-Law League.
"The yearly consumption of the population of Great Britain and Ireland for food, clothing, and lodging, (we give the round numbers only):—
Agricultural produce for food, £.295,479,000
Produce of manufactures, 262,085,000
Imports, (raw produce, &c.) value as landed, 55,000,000
——————-
612,564,000
Deduct exports, 51,000,000
——————-
£.561,564,000"
It follows, then, that whilst foreign trade simply consumes something more than double that of colonial trade, the home trade alone amounts to eleven times over both foreign and colonial together, and by sixteen times as much the amount of foreign trade alone. Upon the hypothesis of Mr Cobden, therefore, foreign trade should be treated as of no value at all in the national sense.