was one of the most liberal as he was one of the most eminent of British
economists and statesmen of the middle of the nineteenth century. He was a
democrat by birth and education, and a Quaker by religion. In 1835, just
before he entered public life, Cobden visited the United States and thus
recorded his impressions on his return:

"America is once more the theatre upon which nations are contending for
mastery; it is not, however, a struggle for conquest, in which the victor
will acquire territorial dominion--the fight is for commercial supremacy,
and will be won by the cheapest.... It is from the silent and peaceful
rivalry of American commerce, the growth of its manufactures, its rapid
progress in internal improvements, ... it is from these, and not from the
barbarous policy or the impoverishing armaments of Russia, that the
grandeur of our commercial and national prosperity is endangered."
[Footnote: John Morley, _The Life of Richard Cobden_, 107, 108.]

It is not, however, any part of my contention that nature should push her
love of competition so far as necessarily to involve us in war with Great
Britain, at least at present, for nature has various and most unlooked-for
ways of arriving at her ends, since men never can determine, certainly in
advance, what avenue will, to them, prove the least resistant. They very
often make an error, as did the Germans, which they can only correct by
enduring disaster, defeat, and infinite suffering. Nature might very well,
for example, prefer that consolidation should advance yet another step
before a reaction toward chaos should begin.

This last war has, apparently, been won by a fusion of two economic
systems which together hold and administer a preponderating mass of fluid
capital, and which have partially pooled their resources to prevail. They
appear almost as would a gigantic lizard which, having been severed in an