"You imagine Cobden a lively, caustic O'Connell, an enthusiast, ardent in politics, rapid, startling in reply? How you deceive yourself, my poor Victorino! He is perfectly simple, fastidious like an Englishman, calm as an axiom, cold, vulgar, if I may so express it, like all great truths. We were friends in two hours; we talked alone almost all night; he related to me his adventures, his struggles; he showed me his mode of action, the strategy of his speech, the little stories with which it was necessary to entertain the people that they might not go to sleep as they listened to him. He lamented the almost insuperable difficulty which the masses offer by their incapacity of comprehending and their prejudices. He gave me a card by which I could find him in Manchester, and we did not separate till we reached the door of my hotel, I overwhelmed with happiness, humbled by such greatness and such simplicity, meditating upon means so noble and results so gigantic. I did not sleep that night. I was in a fever. It seemed to me that war was about to become ridiculous when that system of aggregation of wills and juxtaposition of masses could be so generalized and put into practice to destroy abuses, governments, laws, and institutions.
"What more simple thing! To-day we are two, tomorrow four, next year a thousand, publicly united in the same design. The government will resist? It is because we are not many, because many more remain in favor of the abuse. Then let the preaching come on, and the pamphlets, the daily papers, the association, the league. The Government and the Chambers know the day and the hour in which they are conquered,—and yield! Go and plant such a beautiful system in America!
"Cobden had destroyed, or attacked before commencing his specific work, all the great principles on which the
