Welsh Journals

the futile policy of intrusion in the affairs of other nations, and the world will enjoy commercial and industrial expansion unparalleled in history. 'As little intercourse as possible betwixt the Governments, as much con- nexion as possible between the nations of the world!' It is obvious enough why this simple message should fail to appeal to most contemporaries during the age of Palmerston. It is equally clear why it should carry renewed force for radicals of a later generation who stood out against war in 1914, and why Anglo-American isolationists of all parties should find in Cobden their prophet and their guide for decades afterwards. Notable among these later disciples was J. A. Hobson. His biography of Cobden, first published in 1918, has long been out of print, and its re-issue now is warmly to be welcomed. In some respects, Cobden and Hobson would have been at odds with one another. Cobden was the apostle of unrestricted industrial capitalism, Hobson a mordant critic of it. Cobden saw the wage system as governed by immutable economic laws; Hobson was a leading ideologue of the New Liberalism after 1900 and an advocate of the interventionist state. Cobden tended to see an expansionist foreign policy as a final attempt to satisfy the passions of a dying feudal class and of obsolete dynasties; Hobson, in a famous analysis which caught the attention of Lenin, viewed it rather as the consequence of a mature capitalism forced into colonial investment by under-consumption at home. Yet, as Mr. Neville Masterman points out in a lively and stimulating introduction to this new edition, in many ways Cobden and Hobson shared common values. They were at one in being representative of provincial radicalism, in their devotion to peace and non-involvement abroad, and to free trade and the assault on privilege at home. They both regarded a belligerent foreign policy as the product of social inequalities at home. Their arguments, grounded in the controversies of the Crimean War and the Union of Democratic Control, are still of the profoundest relevance today. The most valuable feature of Hobson's biography was the printing of a vast mass of correspondence to illustrate Cobden's view of foreign and, to a lesser extent, domestic affairs. It documents Cobden's persistent championing of the doctrine of non-intervention from the revolutionary days of 1848 down to the Schleswig-Holstein imbroglio a decade and half later. At the same time, Cobden sternly rebutted the view that non- intervention implied non-resistance, as the Peace Society tended to suggest. Nor was he blind to the threat to international security from other nations, especially from the France of Napoleon III. In a lengthy series of letters to Charles Sumner, Republican senator for Massachusetts, Cobden even attacked the naval blockade pursued by his beloved United States during the Civil War. Indeed, the surrender of Fort Sumner had led Cobden into a painful dilemma since the war between north and south was a conflict between the stronghold of democracy and the citadel of free trade. His patient advocacy of a system of arbitration of international disputes and