Richard Cobden
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Richard Cobden’
Richard Cobden wanted to know why British policy towards China was so different to our policy towards the USA and European powers.
On October 8th, 1856, Chinese authorities in Canton arrested twelve sailors for piracy. Sir John Bowring, governor of Hong Kong, demanded their release, as their ship the Arrow had flown (albeit illegally) a British flag. On the 22nd the obliging Chinese delivered the suspects up; on the 23rd, the Royal Navy nonetheless began a three-week bombardment of Canton. The following February, Richard Cobden expressed his outrage in the Commons.
Richard Cobden questioned both the wisdom and the motives of politicians who intervene on foreign soil.
At the Vienna Congress in 1815, Napoleon’s former empire was shared out by Britain and other European Powers. A semi-autonomous Kingdom of Poland was allotted to Russia, which Russian troops occupied in response to the November Uprising of 1830-31. Calls grew loud for the British and Turkish Empires to restore ‘the balance of power’, but Richard Cobden heard only arrogant self-preservation.
Richard Cobden was not a little envious of the USA’s open and can-do society, but he did not covet her republicanism.
In 1835 the USA stood for strict public economy (that year the national debt hit zero for the first and last time), military restraint, and wise investment of taxpayers’ dollars. These things, Richard Cobden believed, England could usefully copy; but not republicanism. A British republic, he said, she would merely replace one kind of aristocracy with a much less noble one.
Richard Cobden told an Edinburgh peace conference that the biggest threat to the United Kingdom’s security was her own foreign policy.
In May 1853, Russia took military action to liberate Christians in Moldavia and Wallachia (modern-day Romania) from Turkey’s harsh rule. In England, the talk was of sending troops to defend poor Turkey, and of Russia’s secret designs on western Europe. That October, Richard Cobden told a peace conference in Edinburgh that our fears and economic hardships were all of our own making.
Richard Cobden told his audience in the London Tavern that however much sabre-rattling was heard in St Petersburg, the average Russian was a man of peace.
In the opinion of Richard Cobden, the Rochdale MP, Emperor Nicholas I of Russia wasn’t a proper Russian. In his fondness for meddling in the affairs of other European countries he resembled the colonially-minded politicians of the West more than his fellow Russians, for whom the thought of being conscripted for military adventures beyond Holy Russia was abhorrent.
Richard Cobden realised that John Bright, overcome with grief after seeing his young wife die, needed something worthwhile to live for.
The Corn Laws of 1815, designed to protect English farmers from overseas competition, drove up the price of basic foods and plunged working families into poverty. John Bright, then working in his father’s Rochdale mill, joined Richard Cobden’s repeal campaign on September 10th, 1841, as he sat mourning his young wife Elizabeth, ‘lying still and cold in the chamber above us’.