From a salesman on a salary, he evolved into a salesman on a salary and commission.* Next he made a bold stand with two fellow-travelers and asked for the exclusive London agency of a Manchester print mill.* A year later he was carrying a line of goods worth forty thousand pounds on unsecured credit.* “Why do you entrust me with all these goods when you know I am not worth a thousand pounds in my own name?” And the senior member of the great house of Fort, Sons & Company answered, “Mr Cobden, we consider the moral risk more than we do the financial one. Our business has been built up by trusting young, active men of good habits. With us character counts.” And Cobden went up to London and ordered the words, “Character Counts!” cut deep in a two-inch oak plank which he fastened to the wall in his office.*
American spelling retained
From ‘Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers’ (1917) by Elbert Green Hubbard (1856-1915).
* The author of this extract, the somewhat controversial American writer Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915), had himself been a travelling salesman, for Larkin soap.
* The three young entrepreneurs took the coach to Manchester in September 1828, a journey of twenty hours in those days, their heads full of dreams but no specific plans. “We were literally so ignorant of Manchester houses” Cobden admitted “that we called for a directory at the hotel, and turned to the list of calico-printers.”
* According to the Bank of England, goods and services costing £40,000 in 1831 would be worth over £3,455,000 in 2024. “In less than two years from 1830” Cobden later wrote to a friend “we owed them forty thousand pounds for goods which they had sent to us in Watling Street, upon no other security than our characters and knowledge of our business.” The three young men would have struggled to find £600 between them.
* “Cobden succeeded in business” sniffed political opponent Benjamin Disraeli some years later “simply because he got other people to do his work.” This only highlighted the ideological gulf between them. Cobden believed in the social and moral value of the workers’ co-operative; Disraeli, whose two turns as Prime Minister (1868, 1874-80) came after Cobden had died in 1864, thought that a benevolent Government should do everything.