ntury such farmers have become in England
fewer and fewer, until now there are scarcely any left; for there is
such a keen ambition among rich people in England to own land that a
small proprietor cannot hold out against them. A nobleman has been known
to give four or five times its value for a farm bordering upon his
estate, because in an old country nothing gives a man so much social
importance as the ownership of the soil. Cobden's father, it appears,
lost his property, and died leaving nine children with scarcely any
provision for their maintenance; so that Richard's first employment was
to watch the sheep for a neighboring farmer, and this humble employment
he followed on the land and near the residence of the Duke of Richmond,
one of the chiefs of that protectionist party which Cobden destroyed.
With regard to his education, he was almost entirely self-taught, or, as
Mr. Bright observed, in his most cautious manner:--

"He had no opportunity of attending ancient universities, and availing
himself of the advantages, and, I am afraid I must say, in some degree,
of suffering from some of the disadvantages, from which some of those
universities are not free."

This sly satire of the eloquent Quaker was received by the men of
Bradford with cheers; and, indeed, it is true that college education
sometimes weakens more than it refines, and many of the masters of our
generation have been so lucky as to escape the debilitating process.

From tending sheep on his father's farm, he was sent away at ten years
of age to a cheap Yorkshire boarding-school, similar in character to the
Dotheboys Hall described by Dickens many years after in "Nicholas
Nickleby." Five miserable years he spent at that school, ill-fed,
harshly treated, badly taught, without once going home, and permitted
to write to his parents only once in three months. In after life he
could not bear to speak of his life at school; nor was he ever quite the
genial and happy man he might have been if those five years had been
spent otherwise.

But here again we see that hardship does not so radically injure a child
as unwise indulgence. At fifteen he entered as a clerk into the
warehouse of an uncle in London, an uncomfortable place, from which,
however, he derived substantial advantages. The great city itself was
half an education to him. He learned French in the morning before going
to business. He bought cheap and good little books which are thrust upon
the sig