FISCAL POLICY AND AGRICULTURE 359 



ultimately, other countries would adopt our policy, 

 and that the advent of free trade among nations was 

 only a question of time. He himself was a sincere 

 and an earnest man. With no selfish aims, and under 

 personal trials and difficulties that command our 

 sympathy and respect, he pursued a course which he 

 firmly held was for the good of the country. What he 

 said about agriculture he believed. But had he sur- 

 vived to see the result of his policy, and especially its 

 effect on our greatest and most important industry, 

 the probability is that he would have reversed his 

 position. Indeed, there is evidence to show that, 

 had he lived to see the policy of other countries 

 towards us, and the utter failure of all his predictions 

 and hopes, he would have been among the most 

 ardent of tariff reformers. The very character of the 

 man sustains this contention. With the Manchester 

 school of the day the case was different. The spring 

 of their action — as a body — in the free-trade agitation 

 was their own commercial interests. Agriculture with 

 them was a minor consideration, and its subsequent 

 decay, so long as their own trade kept up, excited no 

 concern. 



In the later years of his life, Cobden himself seems 

 to have recognized this position. In a letter to John 

 Bright, 24 September, 1857, he says : " To confess my 

 honest belief, I regard the Manchester constituency, 

 now that their gross pocket question is settled, as a 

 very unsound and, to us, a very unsafe body." 



In the same year he writes, somewhat bitterly, in 

 the same strain (Letter to J. Parkes, 9 August, 

 1857): "The great capitalist class formed an excellent 

 basis for the anti-Corn Law movement, for they had 

 inexhaustible purses, which they opened freely in a 



