Chartists had thwarted the anti-corn law agitation, neither of the two leaders at that time threw themselves with much vigour into the question of Parliamentary Reform. The national response was languid enough as regarded peace and retrenchment, and so stood their position in 1850, when the selection of speeches contained in these volumes commences.

It is impossible not to be struck in perusing them with the freshness and vigour of the handling, and the vast amount of information, regarding both this and foreign countries, which they contain. The student of the political history of the last twenty years will find in them a repertory of thought and reflection, illustrated with great variety, and sometimes in great detail. Whether the views announced be sound or unsound in themselves, or whether, being sound, they may be too unreservedly expressed, no one can fail to appreciate the speaker's meaning, or to admire the boldness, versatility, and strength of his grasp. Breadth of view and originality of thought may perhaps be wanting; but their very absence tends to increase the power and concentration of his assaults. The whole style is combative and denunciatory. He tugs and tears at the abuse he is at war with, striving by reiterated effort, and force applied in all directions, to uproot it from the soil. There is to be found in all his speeches a real, earnest searching after truth; and although he does not spare his epithets in defying those he believes to be obstructing it, there is a genial honesty and good humour throughout, which prove that it is not the acerbity of the temper, but the earnestness of the heart, from which they spring. Nor has he striven in vain. He has done as much as any man alive to bring our institutions to the test of sober reason, and to induce the legislature to look to no end but the welfare of the great masses they are called to care for.

The first volume is divided into five sections: India, Canada, Ireland, America, and Russia. The second contains his speeches on Reform, and on miscellaneous subjects. The field is so wide and extended, that a criticism on his views on all these topics would extend far beyond our limits. We only intend to venture some remarks on one or two of the more important of them. The first, in the order of time, is Russia. The speeches on the Crimean war were among the most effective he ever delivered; and he looks back now with complacency to the views he then unavailingly enforced.

Mr. Cobden and his friends were still intent on their plans for retrenchment and peace, when the little cloud which had been descried on the horizon of the East began to assume the threatening and ominous aspect which resulted in the Crimean

war. The views of Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright on this matter were very intense: nor is it wonderful that they should have been so. They held the war to have been undertaken for a delusion, the result of a blunder, which could end in nothing but calamity; a stupid and ruinous tribute to the phantom, worn out and exploded, of the balance of power; a squabble undertaken for some lazy Turks, to save a corrupt and dissolving empire from a fate which was inevitable. Mr. Bright, however, was in a great minority in the House, and in a far greater one in the country. Even in those districts in which his opinion was wont to have the greatest influence, he found but cold and reluctant encouragement. Their voice was still for war. But he maintained his ground with stedfastness, and even more than his wonted vigour and ability: and when looking over these speeches as now collected, it is impossible not to admire the nervous and energetic protest which he made against the policy which he disapproved.

From some cause or other, the precise nature of which we have never been able entirely to understand, Russia, the most despotic of all the Continental Governments, had relations of a friendly nature with the advanced liberals of the Manchester school. They thought Russian ambition a bugbear, and the fear of Russian aggrandisement a mere bubble and delusion. We think Mr. Cobden's first appearance in print was in a pamphlet which he published about 1832 in defence of Russia's policy. This was never forgotten by Nicholas. They sent missions to St. Petersburg on errands of peace, disarmament, and arbitration; and they thought that the Czar listened with admiration, or at least with approbation, to their suggestions. That he did listen is pretty certain. He thought that he was speaking to the representatives of those who were struggling to wrest the repeal of the Corn Laws from the aristocracy of England, and who might therefore be fairly assumed to speak the mind of the democracy of that country, which was then triumphant. That he had no designs of disarmament, the sequel pretty clearly proved. But he thought that in the advances of these liberal statesmen of England, he saw an opportunity for striking a blow which might never occur again. There is not the slightest doubt, putting aside altogether the diplomatic squabble which led to the actual crisis, that the Russian Emperor was encouraged to make a bold attempt for his long-cherished plan of obtaining possession of the Black Sea, by his belief, on the one hand, that Mr. Cobden and his friends represented the feeling of the community of England; and on the other, that the Aberdeen Government, in which Lord Palmerston was

excluded from the Foreign Office, would be, if not friendly, at least pacific. But for these two elements, the invasion of the Principalities would, perhaps, never have taken place. If Lord Palmerston had remained in the Foreign Office, the Russian Emperor would never have been so deluded as to suppose that England would not compel him to observe the faith of treaties. The views subsequently expressed with great power by Mr. Bright on this subject forcibly illustrate the remark we have already made, that his judgments on political affairs are frequently wanting in breadth and far-sightedness, though not in strength. War is no doubt a great evil, and it is regarded with peculiar abhorrence, as unchristian, by the estimable sect in which Mr. Bright was educated. The tenets of Quakerism have imprinted an indelible stamp upon his opinions and his character. He even shares, we believe, their traditional veneration for James II., and their resolute disbelief of all the charges brought by Lord Macaulay against the memory of William Penn. But war, like the other events which agitate this strange and stormy world, must be judged by its results; and it is impossible to deny that many, we might say most, of the revolutions which have brought about changes the most beneficial to mankind, have been purchased by dreadful sacrifices of blood and treasure. It cannot be said that the lives so sacrificed were sacrificed in vain. The late American civil war was as great a curse as ever fell upon a peaceful and prosperous country; but it has led to the extinction of slavery and the consolidation of the Union-though these things were not foreseen or intended at the commencement. And so with the Crimean war. If that contest had begun and ended, as Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright appeared to suppose, in a vain attempt to prop up the expiring barbarism of the Ottoman Empire, we should agree with them in condemning it. But let us briefly sum up the great political results which have mainly been brought about by the part we played in that struggle. The Emperor Nicholas of Russia, at the head of a prodigious military force-which was supposed to be greater than it was in reality-then exercised a preponderating influence over the whole continent of Europe, and this influence was ever thrown on the side of absolutism and oppression. The Courts of Austria and Prussia were, to a great extent, dependent on that of St. Petersburg, and the theory of the Holy Alliance was still virtually in existence, as was shown by the invasion of Hungary. That alliance was dissolved by the war, and Europe learned with astonishment that the man who had so long overawed her counsels and frustrated her hopes, perished the victim

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of the rage and grief with which he had witnessed the defeat of his armies. The vast preparations accumulated at Sebastopol -evidently with a view to the subjugation of Eastern Europe -were utterly destroyed. The Black Sea was rendered a neutral water. Russia herself, defeated in the military and arbitrary designs of the Czar, was relieved from the pressure of his despotic system, and soon entered upon a very different and far more enlightened course of policy under his son. great work of the abolition of serfdom was accomplished. Russia was opened to a new life: her institutions were reformed; her territory was traversed by railroads; her national forces rapidly expanded. It was in the Crimea that the genius of Cavour discerned the opportunity of Italy, and prepared the measures which have since been crowned by the complete emancipation of that country. The Piedmontese army on the Tchernaya was the herald of those gallant troops who fought at Magenta, at Solferino, and at Custozza. The Congress of Paris, which terminated the war, prepared, though unconsciously, a new future for Europe. Above all, the Crimean war riveted the alliance between England and France. The two nations, represented by their respective armies, were brought into a close and friendly contact which they had not known since the Crusades; and the policy of the two Governments marched, as it has since continued to march, in close accordance. We venture to assert that the Commercial Treaty of 1860, which we regard as the most remarkable exploit of Mr. Cobden's useful life, would not have been possible if the alliance of the two nations had not been cemented on the fields of Alma and Inkermann. To this country even the hardships, losses, and disappointments of this Crimean campaigns rendered an incalculable service, for they taught us that forty years of peace had rendered the organisation of the British army obsolete and inefficient, and they revived a martial spirit among us which this generation will not willingly allow to die. Little more than a year had elapsed after the conclusion of the Peace of Paris in 1856, when the Indian Mutiny broke out. Had we been as ill-prepared for war then as we were in 1853, we tremble to think what the consequences might have been. As it was, the whole machinery of the army was in good working order. Troops were poured into India with a rapidity which astonished those who had judged us by our former shortcomings. India was reconquered. The mutiny was crushed. The dominion of India was transferred from the Company to the Crown, and a new era of improved government began.

These are some of the results which may, we think, be fairly attributed to the part we took in the Crimean contest. Had we stood aloof from it, as Mr. Bright would, we suppose, have wished us to do, we might have avoided some expense and some perils; but very probably these events would not have occurred as they have occurred; Russia would have established her ascendancy over the East, and increased it in Europe; France would have formed other alliances; and we should have failed to exert any influence over several of the most important and beneficial transactions of this century. We might then have been compelled to engage in war, not to direct the course of events, but to defend our own possessions and position in the world.

While therefore we thoroughly agree with Mr. Bright in the policy and the expediency of leaving foreign nations to settle their own disputes, we are also quite clear that military and naval strength are an essential element of our domestic prosperity. It is entirely a question of pounds shillings and pence, whether it is cheaper to prevent the undue aggrandisement of a rival, or to maintain perpetually on foot a force sufficient to withstand the utmost efforts of his increased power. It would be the height of folly to put it in the power of any nation to question with success our naval supremacy, and at the same time to reduce our means of natural and internal defence to an inadequate scale, in the vain delusion that nobody wished to interfere with us.

It has been said truly in favour of Mr. Bright, and we have ourselves given expression to the same sentiment, that he did not court popularity in his opinions on the Crimean war, and that he maintained them against, and in spite of, very clear and strong popular convictions to the contrary. That is quite true, and is creditable to him. But his own principles might lead him to suspect that as this was the case, there was at least a possibility that the people were right, and he was wrong. The instincts of a nation, where the expression of public opinion is free and open, are generally sound. On this question the instinct we believe to have been clearly and unquestionably sound. That a great deal may be done and ought to be done in the reorganisation of the war department, and in the reduction of the expenditure by which it is maintained, we believe and hope Mr. Cardwell will demonstrate. It will be a high distinction if he can succeed in remodelling the system on which our military affairs are conducted, and placing them on a rational footing as regards both administration and expenditure. But when we are asked to come to the conclusion that the policy