The Open Sea
Richard Cobden despaired at British statesmen using the peerless Royal Navy merely to strangle trade in other countries.
1862
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Richard Cobden despaired at British statesmen using the peerless Royal Navy merely to strangle trade in other countries.
1862
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
The Victorian era saw Britain abandon its colonial ‘single market’ in favour of much greater free trade, but Richard Cobden was not yet satisfied. He urged Parliament to stop using the navy to blockade the ports of its commercial and political rivals – in modern terms, to stop imposing sanctions and punitive tariffs.
abridged
I DO not comprehend how any British statesman who consults the interests of his country and understands the revolution which Free Trade is effecting in the relations of the world, can advocate the maintenance of commercial blockades. For a nation that has no access to the rest of the world but by sea, and a large part of whose population is dependent for food on foreign countries, the chief use of a navy should be to keep open its communications, not to close them!
We have thrown away the sceptre of force, to confide in the principle of freedom – uncovenanted, unconditional freedom. During the last fourteen years the increase in our commerce has exceeded its entire growth during the previous thousand years of reliance on force, cunning, and monopoly. This should encourage us to go forward, in the full faith that every fresh impediment removed from the path of commerce,* whether by sea or land, and whether in peace or war, will augment our prosperity, at the same time that it will promote the general interests of humanity.
abridged
By free trade treaties, Cobden meant both sides removing all tariffs and taxes on their merchants’ trade. He did not mean the kind of ‘free trade deal’ which was, and still is, a tangle of conditions and clauses and tit-for-tat taxes. His friend Sir Louis Mallett wrote that “the system of reciprocity treaties and tariff bargains was one of the natural but most pernicious developments of the doctrine of protection”.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.