'For the last twelve years,' he said to Lord Palmerston, 'I have been the systematic and constant assailant of the principle on which your foreign policy has been carried on. I believed you to be warlike, intermeddling, and quarrelsome. At the same time I have expressed a general want of confidence in your domestic politics. I may have been altogether wrong in my views, but I put it candidly to you whether it ought to be in your cabinet that I should make the first avowal of a change of opinion respecting your public policy.' Cobden would not have been what he was, if he had been ready to accept a post 'under one to whom the beliefs and the language of a lifetime made him the typical antagonist.' 'I have a horror,' he said, ' of losing my own individuality, which is to me as existence itself.'
At the general election Cobden had in his absence been returned without a contest as member for Rochdale. But his most important work was again to be done outside of parliament. In the early autumn of 1859 Cobden received a letter from Michel Chevalier, urging him to take an opportunity of converting the emperor of the French to the policy of free trade, at least so far as was necessary for the conclusion of a treaty of commerce between England and France. Cobden went to Hawarden to discuss the project with Mr. Gladstone, then chancellor of the exchequer. Host and guest were in strong sympathy alike in the economic and the ethical sjdes of national policy. Both were quick to perceive the advantage which a commercial treaty with France would be, not only to the work of tariff reform in England, but at the same time to the restoration of smoother relations in the sentiment of the two countries to one another. Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell were consulted, and though they treated the enterprise coolly, they did not forbid Cobden's volunteer mission. He went to Paris on 18 Oct. 1859, and the prolonged and laborious negotiations that followed did not come to a close until 16 Nov. 1860. In two interviews he converted the emperor to the soundness and the feasibility of lowering or removing duties, though the emperor's adhesion to his views was probably due more to political motives, and less to economic or fiscal, than Cobden knew. The negotiations reached the formal stage in January (1860), when Cobden received official instructions and powers. When the secret came out, it roused violent excitement among the French protectionists, and Cobden fought with them a strenuous battle for many months. The treaty was signed by Cobden and Lord Cowley on behalf of England on 23 Jan. The details of the tariff remained to be settled, and this was as important in many respects as the treaty itself. After a holiday at Cannes and a short visit to London, Cobden returned to Paris (20 April) as chief commissioner for working out the scale of duties on particular articles. This fatiguing task occupied him for many hours of every day until November, when all was at last brought to a satisfactory close. Nothing short of the most dauntless faith and persistency could have carried him through. Apart from the immense labour of the transaction itself, he was harassed by the occasional vacillations of the emperor, by the lukewarmness of departments at home, by unfriendly articles in the English newspapers, and above all by Lord Palmerston's ostentatious attitude of suspicion and defiance towards the imperial government. When Mr. Gladstone explained the provisions of the commercial treaty to the House of Commons (10 Feb. 1860), in one of his most famous speeches, he paid a well-earned tribute to Cobden's labours. 'Rare,' he said, 'is the privilege of any man who, having fourteen years ago rendered to his country one signal and splendid service, now again within the same brief span of life, decorated neither by rank nor title, bearing no mark to distinguish him from the people whom he serves, has been permitted again to perform a great and memorable service to his country.' Lord Palmerston offered Cobden either a baronetcy or the rank of a privy councillor. The honour was courteously declined.' The only reward I desire,' said Cobden, 'is to live to witness an improvement in the relations of the two great neighbouring nations which have been brought into more intimate connection by the treaty of commerce.'
The main work of his life was now over, though he persevered manfully in pressing those doctrines of peace and retrenchment which had been the text of his earliest public deliverances. In 1862 he engaged in a sort of single combat with Lord Palmerston on the subject of national defence, and he enforced the same lessons in his pamphlet on ' The Three Panics ' of 1848, 1853, and 1862. When the civil war broke 'out in America, Cobden at first wavered, but it was only for a very short time, and he came forward, along with Mr. Bright, as a strenuous defender of the northern cause. In 1863 he carried on a pungent correspondence with J. T. Delane [q. v.], then the editor of the ' Times ' newspaper. The ' Times ' had, falsely enough, charged Mr. Bright with proposing to divide the lands of the rich among the poor. Cobden, refusing to allow Delane to shelter himself behind the screen of anonymous
