A colourised photograph of Richard Cobden.
Richard Cobden (1804-1865), in an undated photograph which has been colourised. Originally a Manchester textile manufacturer, Cobden came to political prominence in the 1840s during a struggle for power between two factions in Parliament. The protectionists believed that British businesses had to be shielded from overseas competitors in countries such as China and India by a discouraging schedule of taxes and regulations, and by relentless military interventions ‘in the British interest’. Free-traders shared Cobden’s conviction that such policies were both immoral and counter-productive. His greatest achievements were The Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, and the friendly Cobden-Chevalier Treaty with our long-time enemy, France, in 1860.
THERE are two classes of politicians — statesmen the world generally agrees in calling them, though that title, in its proper and nobler sense, belongs to but one of them. One class keeps studiously in sight the rules of justice and humanity, as the principles of legislation and government upon which it conscientiously supposes the welfare of the community to depend. The other class, which is found in all countries and in all political parties, aims at securing and promoting certain minor interests upon one specious pretext or another, which is taken up or laid aside as it may serve or fail to serve the occasion.
I need not say that Mr Cobden belonged to the former of these classes, and was a statesman in the highest sense of the term. In all the public measures which he discussed, he regarded mainly their consequences to the people at large, or, in other words, the good of the human race.
* See also My Standard of a Statesman by Edmund Burke MP.
Précis
In 1866, a year after Richard Cobden died, American journalist and poet WC Bryant made a distinction between the statesman and the politician. The politician, he said, was fickle, preoccupied with short-term advantages to himself and his party, whereas the statesman took a larger view, and acted consistently in the interests of all mankind. Cobden, he said, was a statesman. (59 / 60 words)
