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Updated: May 7, 2025
One or two Cobdenite members of the British Parliament engaged in the useful task of proving that the cost of living in Vienna was on an exorbitant scale, flitted with restrained importance through a land whose fatness they had come to spy out; every fancied over-charge in their bills was welcome as providing another nail in the coffin of their fiscal opponents.
But then there is the other side the question of social reform in this country. Now here again we differ from the Cobdenite. The Cobdenite is an individualist. He believes that private enterprise, working under a system of unfettered competition, with cheapness as its supreme object, is the surest road to universal well-being.
In 1846 Gladstone ranked as a Conservative, but he parted from his old traditions under the leadership of Peel on the question of Free Trade, and for many years to come the most notable of his public services lay in the completion of the Cobdenite policy of financial emancipation.
It is solely with regard to this matter of imports that the Radical party still cling to the Cobdenite doctrine, and the consequence is that their policy has become a mass of inconsistencies. It is devoid of any logical foundation whatever. I know that there are many people, sound Unionists at heart, who still have a difficulty about accepting the doctrines of the Tariff Reformers.
That is the great difference between us Tariff Reformers and the Cobdenites. The Cobdenite only looks at the commercial side. He is a cosmopolitan. He does not care from whom he buys, or to whom he sells.
The wages of agricultural labourers, have risen by more than one-third. The farmers are to be protected and encouraged as they never have been since the Cobdenite revolution; and the Corn Production Bill now passing through Parliament shows what the grim lesson of this war has done to change the old and easy optimism of our people.
Give to every man the right to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market, urged the Cobdenite, and trade would automatically expand. The business career would be open to the talents. The good workman would command the full money's worth of his work, and his money would buy him food and clothing at the lowest rate in the world's market.
The ex-Minister deserved, clearly, any ban that could be put upon him. No sort of remonstrance could hold him from going about openly and persistently exhorting people to "think imperially," a liberty which, as is well known, the Holy Cobdenite Church, supreme in those islands, expressly forbids.
In the following decade he stood for the extension of the suffrage, and it was his Government which, in 1884, carried the extension of the representative principle to the point at which it rested twenty-seven years later. In economics Gladstone kept upon the whole to the Cobdenite principles which he acquired in middle life.
In the words of The Times newspaper: "The Chancellor of the Exchequer has laid broad and deep the basis of further revenue for future years." Those who lately taunted us with being arrested by a dead wall of Cobdenite principles are now bewailing that we have opened up broad avenues of financial advance. They came to bewail the deficit of this year: they remained to censure the surplus of next.
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