NOT A MERE QUESTION OF PRICE.
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Mr. Cobden was urgent and eloquent on the subject of registration. He threw a generous halo around the question:—
"Every age, every generation, had some distinguishing struggle that marked its history. In one century we had the contest for religious freedom—another century marks the era of political freedom—another century comes, and the great battle of commercial freedom has to be fought; and Manchester, and those free cotton districts around it (he called it a free district, because the cotton trade had never been dandled by protection, and never owned its devotion to monopoly), were pledged to take the lead in this great contest—a contest that had already become historical; for it was marked upon our parliamentary annals as one of the greatest of modern combinations. They could not draw back from this contest, but they must bring not merely disgrace upon themselves, but disgrace upon the nation, and prove themselves recreant from the very race from which they sprung. It was not a mere contest for a few more pigs, a few more sheep, or a little more corn. If the mere physical, the material gain to which we were looking, was all that we had to hope from the trial of our principles, why it would be a sordid and mercenary conflict after all. No; the triumph of free trade was the triumph of pacific principles between all the nations of the earth. (Cheers.) It was a blow, and a death blow to the old system of diplomatic intrigue between the governments of countries. It was making them, as the industrious fabricators of this district, and their friend Mr. Brown, and such as him, the ambassadors and merchants of this country, it was giving to them the title-deeds, by which they would secure to themselves and to all nations the blessings of peace for all times. He saw in the distance—he might perhaps be dreaming—but he saw in the distance a world's revolution involved in the triumphs of free-trade principles. The very motives which had led governments and ambitious rulers to rear up great empires, and to aggrandise the world's territory those motives would be gone, and gone for ever, when they had taught people that they could better profit by the prosperity and freedom of other nations, through the peaceful paths of industry, than they could triumph through the force of war or military conquest. (Cheers.) He might be dreaming, but he thought he saw in the distance that great empires, and vast and powerful military and naval establishments, would be no longer necessary in the governments of the world when they had established free trade throughout it. If what he said was founded in reason, and not the dreams of the imagination, then he said this was a cause which was worth contending for; one that not merely the merchant and the manufacturer, but the philanthropist and the Christian might well lay
