Cobden’s imagination was struck by the busy life of the county with which his name was destined to be so closely bound up.  “Manchester,” he writes with enthusiasm, “is the place for all men of bargain and business.”  His pen acquires a curiously exulting animation as he describes the bustle of its streets, the quaintness of its dialect, the abundance of its capital, and the sturdy veterans with a hundred thousand pounds in each pocket, who might be seen in the evening smoking clay pipes and calling for brandy-and-water in the bar-parlours of homely taverns.  He prospered rapidly in this congenial atmosphere; but it is at Sabden, not at Manchester, that we see the first monument of his public spirit—­a little stone school-house, built as the result of an agitation led by him with as much eager enthusiasm as he ever threw afterwards into great affairs of state.

Between 1833 and 1836 Cobden’s character widened and ripened with surprising quickness.  We pass at a single step from the natural and wholesome egotism of the young man who has his bread to win to the wide interests and generous public spirit of the good citizen.  His first motion was towards his own intellectual improvement, and early in life he perceived that for his purposes no preparation could be so effective as that of travel.  In 1833 and 1834 he visited the Continent; in 1835, the United States; and in 1836 and 1837 he travelled to Egypt, the Levant, and Turkey.

In the interval between the two latter journeys he made what was probably his first public speech, at a meeting to further the demand of a corporation for Manchester.  The speech is described as a signal failure.  “He was nervous,” says the chronicler, “confused, and in fact practically broke down, and the chairman had to apologise for him.”

He was much more successful in two pamphlets he published at this time, “England, Ireland, and America,” and “Russia,” in which he opened the long struggle he was to wage against the restriction of commerce, and the policy of intervention in European feuds.  It is no strained pretension to say that already Richard Cobden, the Manchester manufacturer, was fully possessed of the philosophic gift of feeling about society as a whole, and thinking about the problems of society in an ordered connection.

II.—­The Corn Laws

In 1837, Cobden was invited to become candidate for the borough of Stockport.  Although he threw himself into the struggle with all his energy, on the day of election he was found to be at the bottom of the poll.  Four years later he was returned for Stockport by a triumphant majority.  But in 1841 he was no longer a rising young politician; he had become the leading spirit of a national agitation.

In October, 1838, a band of seven men met at an hotel in Manchester, and formed a new Anti-Corn-Law Association.  They were speedily joined by others, including Cobden, who from this moment began to take a prominent part in all counsel and action.  The abolition of the duties on corn was the single object of Cobden’s political energy during the seven years that followed, and their destruction was the one finished triumph with which his name is associated.