THE DEFEAT OF MR. COBDEN.

Lyttelton Times, Volume VIII, Issue 504, 2 September 1857, Page 3

THE DEFEAT OF MR. COBDEN.

(From the 'New York Times.') The result of the general election in England affords a remarkable illustration of the dangers of supposing that either great talents or great services will for ever cover blundering obstinacy with the shield of impurity. We took occasion to remark two or three weeks ago upon the lamentable lack of judgment which Mr. Cobden and his Free Trade colleagues have displayed in dealing witli nearly every great question in the foreign policy of England since the triumph of the League. He displayed, in the discussion of a purely commercial matter, a sagacity, energy, and clear-headed-ness which drew down on him the applause of the whole civilized world, and which enabled him to make head against the most formidable combination with which any politician has ever had to contend. Be came out of the Free Trade agitation, while still in his prime, and found himself among the foremost men of his age, with wits sharpened, by 10 years of vigorous controversy, and with an ambition which might justly have aspired to anything which the State could bestow. Had we bsen asked in 1847 who of all the public men of England held the most enviable posiiion we should undoubtedly have fixed upon Cobden as that one whose lot was most desirable and whose future was most brilliant, as on that famous night he heard Peel repudiate in his favour all claims to the victory just won by Free Trade over Protection. Twenty millions of people in that eventful year blessed, as they sat down to each meal, the dauntless tribune whose fortitude and eloquence had cheapened their daily food in a season of unexampled severity and suffering. All England was at his back. He entered the House of Commons with a prestige to which no aspirant for Parlia. mentary honors within this century could lay claim, and—what is still rarer—his success in the House justified all that had been said of him out of doors. Unfortunately, he fell into the snare by which wiser and better meu than himself have been mined before now. Foreign politics exercised on him the fascination which they exercise more or less on every man \vho dabbles ever so little in public affairs. But his meddling- was more mischievous than that of people of meaner talents. He had peen the triumph of speechifying and pamphletwriting, and bazaars, and petitions over a powerful and united aristocracy, over a policy consecrated by tradition, and glorified by the allegiance of great genius and great eloquence. He rushed headlong to the conclusion that what had vanquished the Lords and country gentlemen would prove equally efficacious in dealings with the Czar. He had spent the flower of his days in glorifying cotton and preaching the omnipotence of bills of lading. He fell into the delusion that these arguments were as potent in the Winter Palace or the Tuileries, as in the Free Trade-hall in Manchester. He has remained under the influence of these hal- ' lucinations, till in 10 years he has lost the last shred of his popularity End prestige* and finds himself kicked out of the small borough in which he had taken refuge from the indignation of his former admirers of the West Riding of Yorkshire, by an ignominious majority of 246. The immediate cause of the expulsion of the whole of the leading members of the Anti-Corn Law League, Cobden, Bright, Milner Gibson, and Walmsley, from the new Parliament, is certainly not so much the course they have .thought lit to pursue on the Chinese question as that which they pursued with such insane pertinacity during the whole course i of the Russian war. Their speeches figured I every week in the leaded type in columns of the Russian journals, as fair expositions of the sentiments of the English people, filled with laudations of Russia, and with denunciations, not only of the management of the war, but of the cause of it, of the objects of it, and of the army which was dying by inches in the trenches of Sebaetopol. Peace at any price was openly preached, not simply in a country whose dearest rights and proudest glories have been won at the point of the sword, but preached in a country which was pouring forth blood and treasure in lavish tide to save its honour. The English would very well have borne a great deal of criticism and rebuke from tongues-which condemned in sorrow. Byt Cobden and Bright nut simply condemned, but condemned with the

malignity of an enemy, and turned their very popularity and reputation into weapons to he used against the very people who had made them what they were. Lord Palnierston owes a great deal of his present triumph, we are well aware, more to the folly and stupidity of his enemies than to the strength of his own position. But he represents an idea which has a still more powerful hold upon the national mind in England than any other, —an idea, too, which, let us add, lies at the base of all national greatness and prosperity—that a people to be great and respected must owe nothing to either the generosity or forbearance of others. He has made heavy blunders and done much mischief. He has excited among the Liberal party in Europe delusive hopes which have resulted in the ruin of thousands and the misery of many millions. But, notwithstanding all this, the man whose name is an offence in the nostrils'of every depot between the Atlantic and the Caspian, fills a hundred palaces with foreboding, and sheds gleams of expectation, let them be ever so faint, into a thousand cells, is a man whom we should be sorry to see England repudiate, and over whose recent and most signal triumph we most heartily rejoice.