COBDEN, RICHARD (1804-1865), English statesman and economist, was born at Dunford Farm, near Midhurst, Sussex, the son of a small farmer, who died when Richard was a child. There were I 1 children, who were befriended by relatives. Richard was sent to one of the bad private boarding schools of those days, in Yorkshire, and in 1819 became a clerk in his uncle's ware house in Old Change, London. After serving in the warehouse he began to travel for the firm. In 1828 he joined with two friends in setting up business as calico merchants. Three years later the firm acquired a factory at Sabden, Lancs., and began to do their own calico-printing. This was the beginning of a busi ness career which brought Cobden an independent fortune and per mitted him in later years to devote himself, untrammelled by financial difficulties, to his life work for greater freedom of trade. He remedied his lack of education by a course of serious study and by travel in the United States (June–Aug. 1835) and in the Near East (1836-37), in Germany (183 8) and elsewhere, making full use of his opportunities of studying the economic and finan cial systems of the countries he visited. At this time he published two pamphlets which show that the broad lines of his ideas on foreign policy were already matured. These are England, Ireland and America (1835), by "a Manchester Merchant," in which he maintained that England had no interest in defending Turkey against Russia; and Russia (1836), in which he attacks the doc trine of the balance of power.
In October 1838 a group of seven Manchester merchants met to form an association to promote a movement for the abolition of the corn laws (q.v.). This became the nucleus of a national association, the Anti-Corn-Law league. From the beginning Cob den was the moving spirit in the league. Though other great names were associated with it, Cobden's was the directing mind. He had already met John Bright in connection with a campaign for providing education for the mass of the people, and had drawn him into politics. Bright's eloquence moved thousands in the meetings organized by the league, but Cobden's counsels carried more weight among statesmen. Throughout the whole of this campaign Cobden linked up the question of free trade with that of peace and disarmament ; he regarded liberty of commerce as a key to international solidarity. He entered the House of Com mons for Stockport at the general election of 1841. Parliament met in August, and Sir Robert Peel moved a vote of censure on the Whig Government, which was carried on Aug. 28. The new administration proposed a modification of the corn law which altered the sliding scale of 1828 and reduced the duty. Villiers' annual motion for repeal was defeated. Cobden presented his case against the corn law in his first speech in the House during the debate on the address. His sincerity and his precise knowledge of the question in hand made a strong impression. He proved a redoubtable opponent of Peel's financial policy, and persistently opposed the reintroduction of income tax.
Cobden desired the minimum of interference in trade and in dustry. When Graham's Factory Bill was brought forward in 1844 he accepted the regulation of child labour but he protested against any "interference with the freedom of adult labour." He was less extreme than Bright in his individualism, but had no use for the early reformers of the terrible factory system of the day, because he would not accept the principle of Government inter vention. On the other hand he ardently supported measures for the improvement of education, and supported Peel's proposal to augment the grant to the Irish Roman Catholic college at May nooth, on the ground that the priests were the instructors of the people and should themselves be thoroughly educated.
Meanwhile Cobden worked incessantly for the Anti-Corn-Law league, speaking all over the country, and, with increasing force in the House of Commons itself. His most powerful speech was perhaps that made in the House on March 13, 1845, when Peel, who was expected to reply, is said to have crumpled up his paper and notes and said to Sidney Herbert, "You may answer this, for I cannot." Some members of the Peel Government had realized at the time of Peel's first budget that the next change in the corn laws must be their total repeal. The prospect of famine in Ire land at the end of the year made the change inevitable. On Dec. 5 Peel resigned. Lord John Russell, invited to form a cabinet, asked Cobden to take office, but he declined on the ground that his mis sion lay outside the House on the public platform. On the loth Peel resumed office. The course of the events in the session of 1846 is related elsewhere (see PEEL). It is sufficient here to say that Peel's famous resolutions included a modified sliding scale of duties for three years, and that after Feb. 1, 1849, oats, barley and wheat should be admitted at a nominal duty of a shilling. The bill embodying this resolution was passed by the House of Lords on June 25, 1846. Four days later Peel resigned, not without a tribute to Cobden. "The name," he said, "which ought to be, and will be, associated with the success of these measures, is not mine, or that of the noble lord (Russell), but the name of one who, acting I believe from pure and disinterested motives, has, with untiring energy, made appeals to our reason, and has enforced those appeals with an eloquence the more to be admired because it was unaffected and unadorned: the name which ought to be associated with the success of these measures is the name of Richard Cobden." The seven years' struggle for repeal left Cobden a ruined man, for he had been compelled to neglect his own business. A sub scription was raised for him to enable him to meet his obligations. With part of the amount provided he bought his birthplace, the farmhouse of Dunford, which was thenceforward his home. He spent 14 months abroad (Aug. 1846—Oct. 1847), visiting the chief countries of Europe and urging on the many public men by whom he was received the necessity of greater freedom of trade. He returned more than ever opposed to a policy of intervention in any shape or form in the political situation of Europe. He now turned to work for the promotion of peace and the reduction of arma ments, the logical complement of free trade, and became a for midable opponent of Palmerston's general foreign policy. In the Parliament elected in 1847 he sat for the West Riding of York shire. In that parliament he brought forward two important motions: one in favour of international arbitration (June 12, 1849), the other the mutual reduction of armaments (1851). He associated himself with the peace movement, at that time de rided, and helped to organize a series of international congresses for the promotion of peace at Brussels, Paris, Frankfurt, Lon don, Manchester and Edinburgh between 1848 and 1851. The panic which took possession of a large section of Englishmen in 1851 on the foundation of the Second Empire in France put his principles to the test. By his resolute campaign against the scare mongers this pamphlet, 1792 and 1853, in Three Letters (1853), Cobden sacrificed the popularity he had won as the man who gave cheap food to the people. With Bright he withstood the torrent of popular sentiment in favour of war against Russia during the period before the Crimean War. He maintained strongly that the future of the Turkish provinces in Europe lay with the Chris tian populations and that England should be on their side and not on the side of the Turk. On Feb. 26, 1857, over the "Arrow" incident (Oct. 1856) in China, when Canton was bombarded on the ground that the Chinese had unlawfully boarded a ship of that name, Cobden brought in a motion condemning the action of Sir John Bowring in this matter, which was carried and led Palm erston to dissolve parliament. Cobden's peace policy had destroyed his electoral prospects. He was defeated at Huddersfield, and retired to his house in Sussex for the time, and then made a second visit to America.
On his return (June 29, 18S9) be found he had been returned unopposed by Rochdale to the new parliament, and that the Whigs were once more united under Palmerston, who asked him to join his cabinet as president of the Board of Trade. This offer, generous from a man of whose policy he had been the stoutest opponent, was declined on the ground that consistency forbade it. Nevertheless Cobden was the organizer of one impor tant achievement of the new ministry, the conclusion of the com mercial treaty with France of 186o. He first discussed the feasi bility of such a proposal with Gladstone, and then with Palmerston and Russell ; from the two latter he received tepid encouragement, but was offered the assistance of the Paris embassy. He proposed to go to France to interview Napoleon III., and in fact, spent a year (Oct. 1859—Nov. 186o) in laborious and at first unofficial negotiations (he only received definite official powers in Jan. 186o) for a mutual reduction of tariffs in the interest of increased trade between France and England. His work for the conclusion of this commercial treaty is proof, if any were needed, that Cob den was not a merely negative advocate of a laissez-faire policy, but a practical and constructive statesman.
The last of the greater issues of policy in which Cobden was involved was the American Civil War. He had been a regular correspondent of Charles Sumner's since 1851, and though his hatred of war made him say frankly that he would not have gone to war for emancipation, he did, after some hesitation, declare for the North, and J. A. Hobson, writing of this correspondence, asserts that he "did more than any other Englishman, save Bright, to correct the mistakes of fact and judgment which confused the issue in this country (Great Britain) at the outset, and to give sound counsel upon the sharp concrete cases which more than once brought us near to the breaking-point with the Federal Gov ernment." Cobden died on April 2, 1865, in London of a chill contracted on a journey which he had insisted on taking in order to be present at a discussion on a scheme of Canadian fortification.
His distrust of Government at home and his limited belief in democracy were coupled with a firm belief in the good. sense and worth of the middle classes. Starting from the belief that it was impossible to regulate wages by national considerations alone in industries competing in a world market he regarded trade union ism as an unjustifiable use of monopoly. He was a child of the industrial revolution, and he believed that the removal of restric tions on the free play of self-interest would bring to everyone his due share of the profits of industry. He opposed factory legis lation for this reason, except in the case of children, for whom he realized that freedom of contract was in fact freedom of coercion. Nevertheless in his later years his confidence in the beneficial results of middle class domination began to be shaken, and the man who had written in 1842 (in a letter to F. W. Cobden) that trade unions were "founded upon principles of brutal tyranny and monopoly," wrote to William Hargreave in 1861, "Have they (the working people) no Spartacus among them to lead a revolt of the slave class against their political tormentors? . . . It is certain that so long as five millions of men are silent under their disabilities it is quite impossible for a few middle class mem bers of parliament to give them liberty." But he was still think ing of the political rather than the industrial machine.
Cobdenism and what is called the Manchester School have fallen into some disrepute for various reasons, and in the criticisms launched on the school there is some danger of losing sight of the great services that Cobden rendered. His views on domestic and foreign policy were closely linked together. His experience convinced him that Government intervention in the affairs of for eign countries was nearly always bad ; he believed in the mini mum of Government at home and the minimum of interven tion abroad. The subsequent controversy, still unsettled, was whether a too "spirited," or a too "passive" foreign policy would lead to the worse results. In the matter of international freedom of trade he was too optimistic. He believed that other countries would follow the English logic. He did not foresee the almost universal strength of economic nationalism, the enormous change in the whole structure of the economic world since brought about by gigantic foreign investments, with the development of new countries by the wealthier nations ; he did not foresee the inter national operation of capital. But in his advocacy of arbitration, disarmament and peace he was far in advance of his time, and his ideals, apart from questions of practical application in circum stances as then existing, are justified by enlightened opinion to-day.
See his Speeches, edit. John Bright and J. E. Thorold Rogers (1870) ; Political Writings of Richard Cobden, with introduction by Sir L. Mallet (1878) ; W. Bagehot, Biographical Studies (1881) ; John Morley, Life of Richard Cobden (1882); J. A. Hobson, Richard Cobden (1918) , which contains Cobden's letters to Sumner, taken from the Sumner-Cobden correspondence preserved at Harvard.