Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/784

 762 THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL bread'; and the rights of labour, deduced therefrom, are two, personal liberty and property, the free use of a man's powers.and faculties,4n.a title to the products of his labours to use or exchange (p. 18). The central idea is ' free exchange,' or (to put the same idea positively) the universal extension of the rule of justice and freedom (38, ef. 41). We need not give the application of Cobrich's principles in detail. Hallet sums them up in eight articles (p. 40), about which it is a common- place, that almost every one of them represents a reform d2sired by English politicians of every hue at the present day. It is no less a conmonplace that Cobrich's policy in its general formula is too vague, iustice and freedom needing to be defined by something more positive than removal of obstacles, and its special articles are too negative; we might lessen military expenditure and we might abolish all indirect taxes, without rectifying the unequal distribution of wealth or securing the mental and moral progress of the English people. It is remarkable to find that Mallet expressly excludes National Education from the eight articles, as.being only one of the means and not one of the ends of govermnent (pp. 40-1), though to ordinary people it would seem to be a nearer approach to a positive reform than any of the favoured eight. The present generation consciously or unconsciously has gone beyond the conception of the State as a kind of corporation separate from the people and in treaty with it to receive a certain payment and render a quid pro qfw. (' A tax is nothing more than a service contributed to the State by the people in return for a corresponding service renderred to the people by the State' p. 54.) Cobrich's services as a statesman seem likely to rank higher than his services as a political theorist. His statesmanship and his consistency in the matter of the Commercial Treaty with France in 1860 are well defended by Mallet, and there was no doubt a clear distinction between this treaty anc one such as the Methuen Treaty of 1703 (drawn up, as Cobden would have said, on the principles of a commercial traveller). The attitude of the English negotiators was altered. The English saw clearly (in 1860) that he benefit to be secured was the consumer's more than the producer's the gain by reducing the herring duty is 'more herrings '. See p. 90), and they had no longer any idea of bargaining for equivalent concessions. It is equally evident that this idea was by no means absent from the Frenchmen. It must be conceded that, on 'high and dry' principles of laissez-faire, England should have been content with what has been opprobriously nick-named ' one-sided free trade'  this was not only the view of purists like J. Lewis Ricardo, Lowe, and lacCulloch, but it was at one time the view of Cobden himself before he gave up the hope of our teaching other nations by example. The very arguments adduced by Mallet and by the anonymous author of the tract on Commercial Treaties (Cobden Club 1870) show that in our Treaties of Commerce from 1860 onwards our' concessions' were (in our own mind) to be only such changes as we should otherwise have made for ourselves without