The Express.
London, England, 1849-01-15 00:00:00

might feel the necessity of writers and of preachers
going forth to teach the doctrines of humanity and of
Christian feeling, as well as to explain how deeply
and universally the material interests and prosperity
of the Wentzville classes are bound up and identified
with peace. We should admit the of thus
preparing the way for a conversionuortrel English
politic to principles of Christian charity and advanced
civilisation. But we should deprecate as idle the
songregation of large masses of the people merely to
EMUKIIIROS to them doctrines repugnant to their ferocity
cad hurtful to their pride.
We have, however, seen no symptoms whatever of
the British nation being what the 21Niss repreeents
it. We have now gone through a long interval of
peace, which has been flour the very first • OPENS of
rivalry of foreign nations towards us. All of these,
______seed as rivals, or who coosider themselves so,
have nomad in strength, in military force, in com-
merce, in conquest. They have pat forth, nay, made
good, pretensions which half a century ago we could not
have hawked. We have had various disputes with
mensal of them supposed rivals, and the press has
frequently made the most of these disputes, to blow a
war-note ; whilst statesmen in power have
equally taken advantage of them to augment
armies and create navies. Yet in no one cane,
that we can remember, has the spirit—the truly lien
spirit—of the British people been stirred from its
magnanimous indifference. Statesmen, indeed, have
been stirred—politicians, who bad grown up in the
school of Prrr and CASTLEREAGH, and who had
known the British people, when lashed by misrepre-
sentation, party frenzy, and the actual conflagra-
tion of war—into a strong interest in the death strag-
gle then going on. But whoever counted on re-
kindling one epark of this old warlike hatred of
France or of America, utterly failed in his efforts and
was disappointed in his hopes. Look at our Syrian
quarrel, our Tahiti difference, oar Maine and our
Oregon squabbles. Did any one of these give rise to
one angry burst of popular English feeling? Look
at oar signposts, oar ballade, our popular literature :
has any one of the military or naval
men who have achieved the most brilliant feats since
1816 —have they been able to become the idols of the
smallest niche in the temple of British admiration ?
Is it not evident to all that the days of hero-worship
are departed, and that the admiration of military
feats, which fed it, has given way in the English
mind to esteem and to aspirations of altogether a dif-
ferent
kind?

We think, therefore, that the great preliminary
task which the Tunes assigns to Mr. COBDEN of
taming the truculent spirit of the savage and warlike
Englishman has been long since performed. We look,
indeed, upon the whole free-trade movement
as the great outward sign and manifestation
of the change which had been silently
wrought on the English mind, and which consisted
chit fly in an obliteration of the hateful and defiant
passions which mark early, or at least, imperfect
stages of civilisation, and the substitution of the more
humane and mole manly, the more charitable and
more wise, the more intellectual and hopeful spirit,
that now an;mates all classes of Englishmen. Mr.
COBDEN himself appears to us not the originator of
the great free trade movement, or peace movement ;
hu the reanit,the child, and the instrument of both.

Mr. COBDENci aims and calling as a politician have
never appeared to ue to be the instilling into the Bri-
tish mind a principle that was nut there. He merely
has seized upon that which was not only already
sown. but sprouting ; he ball but fostered and pro-
tected, and fertilised the growth of what he found a
glum, and which he made a tree.
His purpose and his task are now the same. He has
calmly and profoundly observed the workings of the
public mind, and has seised some of the better and
most promising feelings which exist there, to appeal
to them, encourage them, and bring them forth to act
as an influence upon those classes which are conduct-
ieg the government to their own and to their country's
ruin, on the most mistaken and superannuated princi-
ples. But he has no more originated the peace
movement, than he did the last great stride and com-
pletion of free trade. The country was already
marching forward, and in putting himself at its head,'
he 'delved its pace and fell into its march.
It is much to be feared that in the present great
and onward movement, the middle and lower classes
and their leaders have progressed alone. It is much
to be feared that the higher end the legislative class
in the country has lingered behind in the old
ideas of half a century back. They still ima-
gine that they could get up a war upon a
trifling pretext, and lash up English combativeness
by falsehood as a prelude to emptying Britons'
pockets for subsidies and expeditions. The article in
the Times of Friday morning really strikes us, es
if it were written fifty
inkhorn of Dr. Slop, whom
COBBETT immurtalised, and who insisted that the re-
coLquest of America was the only dignified political
object of the country which Lid humbled NAPOLEON.
We should care little for such observations of the
Times were they but the idiosyncrasy of a jour-
na'. But such unfortunately are the retro-
grade and mistaken ideas entertained by the
governing class of this country. The Times speaks
the opinions of that clam, and merely makes the mis-
take of considee ing it to be the public. All that the
Ti'mes says of the difficulty which Mr. COBDEN will
have to convert his audience to the ways of peace
and the feasibility of economy, is perfectly true, if we
suffer that audience to be, not the public, bat parlia-
ment—not the middle, and industrious, and inde-
pendent classes, but those who live upon office, upon
salaries, and upon honours, and who are, in fact, the
parasites of the budget. These, indeed, there will be
much difficulty in converting ; powerful and painful
must be the logic that will persuade them. Most ready
would they be, most ready indeed they are, to take
advantage of even. foreign disturbance or convulsion,
to exaggerate the accounts, to call riot anarchy, and
!mettle a state of war. A band of outcasts, rollicking
over frontiers is styled an invasion of Belgium. Au
occupation oiSchleswig is represented an embroiling
of the whole north. And the infantine efforts of
CRARLE4 ALBERT after aggrandisement are given as
excuses for England's keening 200,000 men under
arms.

When the patty makes use of sneh arguments as
these it is p:eading a cause, not expressing • convic-
tion. It is not addressing the same great public that
Mr. COBDEN and his brother orators addressed.
It is merely addressing words of plausibility and
comfort to a clique, and most dangerously encoura-
ging and flattering that aristocratic clique into a be-
lief that it knows and represents the ideas and inte-
rests, and that it follows the tendencies of the English
people, and this at the very time when the people, as
at Manchester, have given most unequivocal signs of
being animated by sentiments and prepossessed by
ideas in direct contradiction with the preaching. of
the Ames and the entire policy of its patrons.

DIVESTED of its dense atmosphere of details the
present happily improving condition of the country is
not a complex phenomenon. Upon a scale exixed-
ingly imposing—and surrounded by circumstances of
the meet bewildering variety—the cause radically at
the bottom of the movement is neither a novelty nor
a marvel. Mankind have been often taught, by
example as well as precept, that a country becomes
rich, as the materials of its industry are commanded
in abundance, and as the ingenuity of its people is
exercised with success. No effort of legislation could
revive the languishing prosperity of Flanders after
' the fleets of Holland had ceased to convey the corn-
were. of Christendom. Nur could any combination
of means preserve these islands from the long
and dismal period of suspen-e generated by
the years of dearth which intervened between
1839 and 1843. Possessed rif accessible raw materials
on the one hand, and enjoying a reasonable sufficiency
of articles of food upon the other, an ingenious and
persevering people stand in very little danger of dis-
tress. Of the two things, the cheapness of hying is
decidedly the more important. Reckon up the
hundreds of people who are so fortunately circum-
stanced that a rise of 30 per cent in the price of corn
will leave their expenditure on cottons, and cloth, and
hardware unaffected ; and as a contrast count up the
millions of working men whose consumption of every
species of manufac•nre is determined principally by
the margin between the amount of their wages and
the eat of their subsistence ; and the process will be
very imperfectly performed if it does not impress
upon us, with all the force of arithmetical
are ithrsis, the vital connexion between the
food and the prosperity of a country like
Great Britain. ir against an abundance of food
I) on place a decided deficiency of the elements of man-
ufacture, you can scarcely avoid the occurrence of a
diminished consumption arising out of an increased