Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843

COMMERCIAL POLICY—SHIPS, COLONIES, AND COMMERCE

Who, standing on the shore, has not seen, as the gale freshened into storm and swelled into the hurricane, the waves of the clear green sea gradually lose their brightness, until raking up from the lowest depths, convulsed with the mighty strife of the elements, the very obscene dregs and refuse of all matter terreous, or instinct of life, the mounting billows become one thick and unsightly mass of turbid waters, chafing with all the foam and froth of the unclean scourings of the deep, rioting in the ascendant? As in the world physical, so is it with the order of nature in the world moral and political. As the social horizon becomes troubled, as reform careers on to revolution, the empire of mind is overwhelmed—the brute matter and fiercer spirits of the masses ascend, and ride the tempest political more triumphantly as incipient confusion thickens into confirmed chaos.

The bad eminence popularly of men so devoid of all principle and integrity, so strangely uncouth and assorted, as the Daniel O'Connells, the John M'Hales, and the Feargus O'Connors; of men so unlearned in all principle, political and economical—so wanting, moreover, in the presence of the higher order of moral sentiments, as the Cobdens, the Brights, the Rory O'Mores, the Aucklands, and Sydney (he of the League) Smiths, is among the worst symptoms of the diseased times upon which the country has fallen. It recalls forcibly to mind, it reproduces the opening scenes and the progress, the men and the machinery, of the first French Revolution, the precursor of so many more, upon the last act of the last fashioned melodrama of which the curtain has not yet probably descended. How then the meaner spirits succeeded in the whirlwind of change, to the mightier minds which first conjured and hoped to control it; how the Mirabeaux, the Lally Tollendals, the Mouniers of the Assembly, were replaced and popularly displaced by the sophists and intriguers of the Gironde and the Constituent; how, in the Convention and the hall of the Jacobins, the coarser men of the whole movement—the Dantons, the Robespierres, the Marats, the facetious as ferocious Bareres, the stupid Anacharsis Clootzes—trampled under foot, or finished with the guillotine, the phraseurs and meneurs of the Gironde, your orators of set speech, glittering abstractions, and hair-splitting definitions; the Brissots, Vergniauds, Condorcets, and Rolands, who could degrade, dethrone, and condemn a king to perpetual imprisonment, but were just too dainty of conscience to go the whole hog of murder. As history, like an old almanack, does but repeat itself within a given cycle of years, so the same round, cast, and change of characters and characteristics, with all the other paraphernalia of the great drama, Reform and Revolution, as performed in France, have been, and are in due order enacting and exhibiting in this country. We have already seen, however, the Greys, Hollands, and Broughams, the fathers and most eloquent apostles of Reform, dethroned by a clique of large talkers about great principles, with a comparatively small stock of ideas to do business on, such as Mr appropriation Ward, the Tom Duncombes, Villierses, &c., men vastly inferior in talents and attainments, after all, to the Gironde, of whom they are the imitatores servum pecus; whilst these again "give place" on the pressure from without of the one-idea endowed tribe of Repealers of Unions and Corn-Laws—the practical men of the Mountain genus—the O'Connells, Cobdens, and Brights, who, not yet so fierce as their predecessors of the Robespierre and Clootz dynasty, are so far content with patronising the "strap and billy roller" in factories, instead of carting aristocrats to the guillotine, which may come hereafter, if, as they say, appetites grow with what they feed on. For it is a fact recorded in history, that Robespierre himself was naturally a man of mild temperament and humane disposition, converted into a sanguinary monster, as some wild beasts are, with the first taste of human blood. Anacharsis Clootz, his coadjutor, the celebrated "orator of the human race," in his day, was at least a free trader as thorough-going, as eminently eloquent and popular a leader, as Mr Cobden himself.

On the present occasion, our business chiefly lies with the gentleman known as Mr Alderman Richard Cobden, M.P. for the borough of Stockport, one of the first samples sent up of municipal and representative reform achievement. Mr Cobden is an example of successful industry when translated to a proper sphere of action. Fortunate in the maternal relationship of a Manchester warehouseman, domiciliated in the classic regions of cotton and Cheapside, he was taken as an "odd lad" into the establishment. In process of time he was advanced to the more honourable grade of traveller, in days of yore styled "bagman," to the concern. Somewhere about 1825 or 1826, we find him transplanted to Manchester, in partnership with two other persons of the same craft and trading position, where they enjoyed the patronage of the late Mr Richard Fort, an extensive calico-printer, at, and in his latter years member for, the borough of Clitheroe in the north of Lancashire. He leased to them one of his print-works near Chorley, and such, it is understood, was the success of the trio, that when, after a partnership of some thirteen or fourteen years, they separated, the division of fairly won spoil accruing to each was not less than £.30,000. Within the space of fourteen years say, industry had created out of nothing the incredible sum of £.90,000. During his travels, like Jemmy the sandman, for orders, Mr Cobden became initiated into the science of "spouting;" he became the oracle and orator of bars and travellers' rooms; the observed of all observers, from the gentlemen of the road down to waiters, barmaids, and boots. The roadsters of his, as of these days, were no longer, however, of the same high-toned class as that of the "bagmen" in times gone by. Tradition tells now only of the splendid turns-out, the dinner-table luxury, the educated commercial polish, the "feast of reason and the flow of soul" enjoyment, of a race defunct; the degenerate crew of Cobden's association, with wages cut down to short common commissions, dined not at home; tea and turn-in, with a sleeping draught of whisky toddy, were the staples of mine host's bill. Such is briefly the report of the rise and progress of Mr Cobden in the world, as we have it from quarters entitled to regard; various exaggerated statements about his hundreds of thousands acquired, are afloat as usual in cases where men spring from nothing; his trading career has been sufficiently prosperous and extraordinary, not to be rendered incredible by ridiculous inventions of friends or foes. About the locale of his birth and residence, of his origin and antecedents, Mr Cobden himself ever maintains a guarded silence, as if, with aristocratical airs growing with his fortunes, he were ashamed, and would cast the slough of family poverty and plebeianship; or perhaps he calculates on leaving the world, Sussex at least, hereafter to dispute the honours of his paternity like another Homer.

Mr Cobden is but a type, not of the highest cast either, of the manufacturing operatives of Lancashire. You will find his equal in one at least out of every ten of the adult factory workmen of Lancashire, whose wits are sharpened by everyday conflict and debate in clubs and publics; you will often meet his superior in those self-educated classes. We have not unfrequently read speeches at public meetings by intelligent operatives in Lancashire, which showed a more profound acquaintance with, and greater powers of development of the rationale of political and economical philosophy, in single instances, than can be discovered in the mass of harangues poured forth by Mr Cobden, were the flowers ever so carefully culled and separated from the loads of trashy weed. His forte consists in a coarse but dauntless intrepidity, with which respectability and intellect shrink from encounter. The country squire, educated and intelligent, but retiring and truth-loving, retreats naturally from contest with a bold, abusive, and unscrupulous demagogue; even the party he serves, holds off from contact and communion with him. He never quails, therefore, because never matched, unless before Mr Ferrand, the fearless member for Knaresborough—a man most ill-used, even abandoned by the very party he so signally serves; yet who is never slow, as occasion offers, to chastise the cur which snarls whilst it crouches before him. The eloquence of Mr Cobden is of that vulgarly-exciting sort, well adapted to the level of the audiences, the scum of town populations, to which it is habitually addressed. Without the education of the late Henry Hunt, he has quite as much capacity and more tact, with the single exception, that when attempting to soar to the metaphorical he is apt to enact the ludicrous blunders of Astley's clown aping the affected pomposity of the master; as v.g. in the "demon rising from the Thames with an Act of Parliament in his hands." Mr Alderman Cobden is, withal, a very ostentatious declaimer about "great first principles;" but into the nature and the definition of those principles he is the most abstemious of all men from entering. The subtlety of a principle escapes the grasp of his intellect; he can deal with it only as a material substance clear to sight and to touch, like a common calico. Hence he talks about principles and cotton prints as if they were convertible terms.

Such as he is, Mr Cobden, it cannot be denied, fills for the present a large space in the public eye; and so he will continue to fill until occult party supports are withdrawn, and, having served the turn, he is left to the natural operation of the principles of gravitation, and to sink to the nothingness from which he has been forced up by the political accidents and agitation of the day. Lamentably astern in economical lore and political knowledge as he is, and as the want of that educational preparation upon which alone the foundation of knowledge and of principles can be raised, has left him, Mr Cobden, it must be conceded, turns the old rags, the cast-off clothes, of other people's crotchets to good account popularly; he succeeds where others fail, not because he is less ignorant but because he is more fearless. But newly come into the world, as it may be said, with little learning from books, with understanding little enlarged by study, and furnished only with those clap-trap generalities, that declamatory trash, which may be gleaned from reading diligently the Radical weekly papers, Mr Cobden boldly takes for granted that all which is new to himself must be unknown to the older world about him. Thus he appropriates, without scruple, because in sheer ignorance, the ideas and discoveries, such as they are and as they seem to him, of others, his more experienced Radical contemporaries. He plunders Daniel Hardcastle, in open day, of his banking and currency dogmas; he fleeces Bowring before his eyes of his one-sided Free Trade and Anti-corn-Law stock in business; nay, he mounts Joseph Hume's well-known stalking-horse against "ships, colonies, and commerce," (colonial,) and forthwith on to the foray. Yet he alone remains unconscious of the spoliations patent to all the world besides—

 
"Where ignorance is bliss 'tis folly to be wise."
 

He retails the worn-out conceits of others as new and wondrous discoveries of his own genius and profound meditation; and all with such a simplicity and complacency of self-satisfied conviction, that you never dream or impugning the good faith with which

 
——"His undoubting mind
Believed the magic wonders which he sung."
 

Thus has it been with him specially in the last new case of poaching on the manor of Mr Joseph Hume, whose game he unhesitatingly appropriates, disguising it only in a sauce of his own flavouring. After sundry mystical heraldings forth, at various public meetings, of a mighty state secret for the cure of all state ills, which was labouring for vent in the swelling breast of Mr Alderman Cobden, M.P., the hour of parturition at length arrived; he was—after the one or two hours' agonies of a speech delivered in the for ever memorable day of June 22, 1843—delivered of the mare's nest so miraculously conceived. Here is the bantling bodily, stripped of all the swaddling-clothes of surplus verbiage in which it was enveloped on entering the world of Westminster—resolved, "That, in the opinion of this house, it is not expedient that, in addition to the great expense to which the people of this country are subject for the civil, military, and naval establishments of the colonies, they should be compelled to pay a higher price for the productions of those colonies than that at which similar commodities could be procured from other countries, and that therefore all protective duties in favour of colonial produce ought to be abolished." Our "colonial system" was denounced by this colonial Draco as "one of unmixed evil; … there was no subject upon which there was greater misapprehension than this … the new facts he should lay before the house would, no doubt, prove his position." Happy the legislature illumined with the infusion of Cobden's Bude light; thrice blest the people, both inside and outside of the house, amongst whom, all alike, "a great deal of misapprehension upon this point prevailed," whose darkness was about to be discharged by the same master mind which was, and anon is, busied in the discharge of Turkey reds from cotton chintzes at Chorley print-works.

We need not remind the public, that the peculiar phrases of that disease with which the mind of Cobden is so profoundly impregnated, essentially resolve themselves into the moneymania; the leading characteristic of the mental hallucinations with which the patient is tormented, consists in the inveterate habit of reducing all argument into arithmetical quantities; of calculating the value of all truth at some standard rate per pound sterling, of what it might possibly produce as a matter of trade; of confounding syllogisms with ciphers, and lumbering all logic into pounds, shillings, and pence. With diagnostics of disease so unmistakably developed, it would only be exasperation of the symptoms to exhibit remedially in other than the peculiar form which the patient fancies for the kill-or-cure-all draught; and since he has raised the suit, of which he is the self-constituted judge, in which Cocker is pitted against the colonies, we shall even humour the conceit, and try the question with him according to the principles of law and logic, as laid down and reduced by himself into the substantial shape of a Dr. and Cr. account, balances struck in hard cash, and no mistake.

Firstly, to begin with the beginning, which Mr Cobden, with customary confusion of intellect and arrangement, shoots into the midst of his arithmetic. The worthlessness of the colonies is argued upon the figures, which show that, of the total exports of the United Kingdom, but one-third is absorbed by them, whilst two-thirds are taken by foreign markets; therefore it follows, not that the colonial trade is by 50 per cent less important than foreign, but that, relatively, it is not only of no importance at all, but, by all the amount, an absolute prejudice: such, at least, is the rule-of-three logic of the Cobden school, as, viz.:—

"They should, however, consider what the extent of their trade with the colonies was. The whole amount of their trade in 1840 was, exports £.51,000,000; out of that £.16,000,000 was exported to the colonies, including the East Indies; but not one-third of their export trade went to the colonies. Take away £.6,000,000 of this export trade that went to the East Indies, and they had £.10,000,000 of exports to set against the £.5,000,000 or £.6,000,000 annually which was voted from the pockets of the people of this country to support these colonies."

We shall come in season meet to the five or six millions sterling said to be voted annually "to support the colonies." Now, admitting that the sixteen millions, as stated, of exports colonial do contrast unfavourably with the thirty-five millions of foreign, and that by all the difference, by more than the difference, colonial trade is disparaged in its importance, what becomes of this arithmetical illustration of the superiority of foreign trade, when by the same standard we come to measure it against the home trade, scarcely less a subject of depreciation and vituperation than the colonial, with thinkers of the same impenetrable, if not profound class as the member for Stockport? Here, for his edification, we consign the resulting figures from the standard set up by himself, as they may be found calculated and resolved from minute detail into grand totals in the "General Statistics of the British Empire," by Mr James Macqueen, an authority, perhaps, who will not be questioned by competent judges any where without the pale of the Draconian legislators of the Anti-corn-Law League.

"The yearly consumption of the population of Great Britain and Ireland for food, clothing, and lodging, (we give the round numbers only):—

It follows, then, that whilst foreign trade simply consumes something more than double that of colonial trade, the home trade alone amounts to eleven times over both foreign and colonial together, and by sixteen times as much the amount of foreign trade alone. Upon the hypothesis of Mr Cobden, therefore, foreign trade should be treated as of no value at all in the national sense.

Having disposed of Mr Cobden according to Cocker, in reference to his arithmetical demonstrations of the superiority in point of pounds, shillings, and pence value of one sort of trade over another, we may notice some petty trickery, cunningly intended on his part, consisting in the suppression of figures and facts on the one side, and their aggregation on the other, &c., by way of bolstering up unfairly a rotten case. He states the whole colonial trade at £.16,000,000 only, inclusive of British India, whereas Porter's Tables, which he must have consulted, give the total exports of Great Britain to all the world for 1840,

Mr Cobden knew well, however, that Gibraltar, Malta, and the Ionian Isles are not, and cannot be considered as, colonies. They are in fact military stations held for political and commercial objects. It would be ridiculous to suppose that the rock of Gibraltar, with a population of 15,000 souls, should consume of British imports alone £.1,111,176, the value actually entered for that port in 1840. That amount should be accounted as to the credit of foreign export trade, and so Mr Cobden reckoned it, without, however, drawing the distinction, as he should have done. But that would have exposed the miserable chicanery of the double dealing he had in hand; for whilst taking credit for the exports to Gibraltar as part and parcel of foreign trade, he proceeded, by way of doubly weighing the balance, to charge all the civil and military expenditure of the garrison and fortress against colonial trade, so that he treated Gibraltar as a colony in respect of its cost, and as a foreign country in respect of its trade. Cunning Isaac! here we have his military arithmetic:—"Upon the 1st of January in this year, their army numbered 88,000 rank and file. They had abroad, exclusive of India, 44,589. So that more than one half of that army was stationed in their colonies; and as it was stated by the noble lord the member for Tiverton in his evidence, for every 10,000 of these soldiers that they had in the colonies, 5000 were wanted in England for the purpose of exchange and recruiting. So that not only one-half, but actually three-fourths of the army were devoted to the colonies. The army estimates this year amounted to £.6,225,000, the portion of which sum for the colonies amounted to £.4,500,000." Now, as the garrison of Gibraltar alone consists of about 4000 men, to which add 2000 as the proportion for the reserve in England for recruiting and exchanges, it follows that of the 44,500 men on colonial duty, to which add the reserve in England, 22,250, one-eleventh are stationed in and wanted for Gibraltar alone, the charge of which to be rateably deducted from the whole sum of £.4,500,000, falsely set down as incurred for the colonies, would be about £.410,000. If to this sum be added £.275,000 for "new works in Gibraltar," as stated by Mr Cobden himself from the estimates—ordnance expenditure, (1000 guns,) £.25,000 only—share of navy estimates, £.50,000 only—we have a gross sum of above three quarters of a million sterling as the cost of a fortress whose sole utility, in peace or in war, is the favour and protection of foreign trade—of the trade of the Mediterranean, of which it is the key; and the nation is saddled with this cost for, among others, the special behoof of that economical and disinterested patriot Mr Cobden himself, who trades to the shores laved by the waters of that sea, the Levant and the Dardanelles, if not the Black Sea. Why, Gibraltar alone, with its 15,000 of population, is more than double the charge of Canada with its million of people, one-half just emerged out of a state of rebellion, if not quasi rebellious yet. So with Malta, its garrison of about 3000 men; and, besides, a naval squadron for protection, that island being the headquarters of the Mediterranean fleet—a fleet and a station exclusively kept up for the protection of foreign trade, if for any purpose at all. And so also with the Ionian Islands, garrisoned with 3300 troops. Taking the garrison forces of Malta and these islands at 6000 men only, with the reserve in England of 3000 more, making altogether 9000, the rateable share of expense, according to the calculation of Mr Cobden, for the whole army, would be about £640,000. Add to this sum the estimate of £410,000 for the garrison alone of Gibraltar, and we have the gross sum of £1,050,000 for the three dependencies of Gibraltar, Malta, and the Ionian Islands, under the head of those army estimates, amounting to £4,500,000, which Mr Cobden veraciously charges to the account of the colonies. We purposely leave out of question for the present the consideration of the other heavy charges in naval armaments, ordnance, &c., to which this country is subjected for the same possessions, because we have still to deduct other portions of the army expenditure set down as for colonial account—that is, as the penalty paid for keeping colonies; whereas a foreign trade of thirty-four or thirty-five millions, costs the country nothing at all, according to the numeration tables of Mr Cobden, and therefore should be all profit.

Passing from Europe, we come to Austral-Asia, where Great Britain, among others, possesses no less than three penal colonies. It will not be contended that New South Wales, Van Diemen's Land, and Norfolk Island, were established either with economically trading or political objects; that, in point of fact, they were established in any other sense than as metropolitan prisons, for the safe keeping, punishment, and moral reclamation and reform of those quasi incorrigible offenders, those criminal pests, by which the health of society was distempered, and its safety endangered in the parent state. Therefore, whatever the military or other expenditure incurred, it must be as much an obligation in its supreme or corporate capacities upon the state benefited, as the support of the criminal jurisdiction at home in all its ramifications, from the chief judges of the land down to the lowest turnkey at Newgate. We need not stop to enquire in what proportion the manufacturing system, with the immoral schools of radicalism, irreligionism, and Anti-corn-Law Cobdenism, have contributed to people the penal settlements, and, pro tanto, to aggrieve the national treasury. Certain it is, and a truth which will not be questioned, that by far the largest share of that criminal refuse has been cast off by and from the manufacturing districts; and of which, therefore, the colonial trade portion indirectly contributed should be rateably the minimum, as compared with foreign trade. In his Statistics of the Colonies of the British Empire, Mr Montgomery Martin remarks of New South Wales, that "it should be observed that a large part of the military force is required to guard the prisoners." Let us take the number of troops so employed at 2600, which will not be far from the mark, the corresponding home reserve of which will be 1300 more, and we then arrive, with the help of Mr Cobden's arithmetic, and starting from his own fixed datum of total charge, at a sum, in round numbers, of £265,000 army expenditure for the three penal colonies; the more considerable proportion of which must at least be set down as arising indirectly from foreign trade, and certainly far the least from colonial, so far as chargeable upon either.

We have next, taking Mr Cobden's rule of practice, about £.50,000 actual military expenditure in St Helena, to which add reserve in England, and a total of about £.70,000 is arrived at; which cannot be placed to colonial account as for colonial purposes, since the island is purely a military and refreshment station for vessels en route for China, India, and the seas circumflowing; and foreign trade, therefore, as much concerned in the guilt of its expense as colonial traffic. The amount of charge, therefore, although remaining to be deducted from the colonial head, may be left as a neutral indeterminate item. But the military expenses for Singapore, Penang, and Malacca, about £.80,000, cannot be for colonial account at all, because stations merely for carrying on foreign trade, against which chargeable, with the civil establishments as well, whether in whole or in part, paid by the East India Company or not.

Returning westward, we have the Bay of Honduras with a military establishment, including reserve as per Cobden, expending about £.50,000, which ranges for the far greater part within the category of the cost attending foreign trade. Then, on the West African slave-trading coast, we have Sierra Leone, with a military expenditure, actual and contingent, of about £.25,000. There are the Cape Coast Castle, Acera, Fernando Po, and other small African settlements besides, which cannot cost less, in military occupation, than some few thousands a-year, say only £.10,000, all for foreign trade, since colonization and production are nil; and with Sierra Leone, they are only kept, or were established, for the purpose of suppressing the trade in slaves, and promoting a foreign trade in that quarter of Africa. Coming to Europe we have Heligoland, a rock in the North Sea, which, as only costing something more than £.1000 per annum on foreign trade account, we may leave out of question. Now, without pretending on the present occasion to make up and offer an approximate estimate of the proportion of army expenditure charged against the colonies by Mr Cobden, which should be set down either to political account, as arising from the possession and maintenance of outposts necessary for defensive or defensively aggressive purposes, in case of, or for the prevention of foreign war, or for the protection and encouragement of foreign trade, in which a right large portion of the military expenditure for Jamaica, Nova Scotia, the Bahamas, Bermuda, &c., may be regarded, we shall content ourselves with reducing his wholesale estimate of colonial army charge by the materials antecedently furnished. The reductions will stand thus, premising that in respect of Singapore, Penang, and Malacca, we have not the means of ascertaining what proportion of the charge falls upon the national treasury, as part is borne by the East India Company. Of one fact there can, however, be no doubt; namely, that nearly the whole of that charge is incurred for the support and maintenance of foreign trade, just in or about the same degree as the charges for Gibraltar.

This discount of about 35 per cent at one "fell swoop" from an audaciously mendacious account-current, would be deemed sufficiently liberal if dealing with other than the "measureless liars" of the League; it is far, however, from the whole sum which will be charged upon, and proved against them, on occasion hereafter when the general question shall be progressed with. The rogues that fleeced the simple stripling, Lord Huntingtower, out of 95 per cent for his bills, were not, as shall be proved, more unscrupulous cheats and abusers of individual, than the League are of public faith.

But the discount of Cobden's Cocker veracity here established, with which for the present we shall conclude, is far (enormous, almost incredible though it be) from the full measure of his intrepidity in the "art of misrepresentation;" crediting him, as upon fair consideration we are bound, with misrepresenting to some extent from sheer ignorance, from want of that early mental training, or maturer discipline, which alone can qualify for the severe labour of researches into, and the analysation of truth. For, unfortunately for the question he has raised, although not so far entertained by the legislature, the very figures discounted from his colonial fictions tell against, and must be carried over to the debit of, his highly cherished foreign trade account, the cost of which to the country will be approximately verified on another occasion in Blackwood. It is the distinctive mishap of the family of the Wrongheads, the illiterate, one-idea'd class of which he is a member, that they never can contemplate a friendly act without perpetrating mischief, nor intend mischief without unconsciously achieving discomfiture and disgrace. For of the £.1,550,000 colonial overcharge in military expenditure alone of this shallow, unreflecting, and superficial person, not less certainly than £1,200,000 must be charged to the account of foreign trade, the special trade he delights to honour. It will constitute, as he will find, a material item in the general balance-sheet which we purpose to draw hereafter between the advantages of foreign and colonial trade.