Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/274

 It will be necessary to make a careful examination of a work published by Mr. Cobden in April, 1853, which I have no doubt was read by the Czar Nicholas and had great influence in determining him on war by leading him to imagine that England had really fallen into the condition described in the words of a French Vice-Admiral which I will quote—a condition such that the French or any other foreigner had only to effect a landing in order to drive the English before them like a flock of sheep and plunder and insult them to any extent that might please the new conquerors.

Mr. Cobden would not, it may be assumed, take a German's view of a Channel Tunnel, but he was not altogether unlikely to take a view more favourable to France than an average Englishman would do.

In March, 1853, Mr. Cobden published "1793 and 1853, in three letters," in the preface to the Library Edition of which he says:—

"'I have been charged with an anachronism in having designated the hostilities which terminated in 1815 as the war of 1793 It is true that there were brief suspensions of hostilities at the truce of Amiens, and during Bonaparte's short sojourn at Elba; but even if it were clear that Napoleon's ambition put an end to the peace, it would prove nothing but that he had by the ordinary workings of the moral law been"