isters
England could possibly have, and that his views had not undergone the
slightest change. He felt that it would be doing violence to his own
sense of duty, and injuring his own character for consistency in the
eyes of his countrymen, to profess to act with a minister to whom he had
all along been opposed on public grounds."

Mr. Cobden's next great service was in bringing about the treaty of free
commerce with France, a service which has endeared him to the French
beyond all English statesmen, and which brought him from the Queen the
offer of a Baronetcy, which he declined, as he also did in January last
Mr. Gladstone's offer of the chairmanship of the Board of Audit, at a
salary of two thousand pounds. Well might Gladstone say of him, as he
did,--"Rare 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 loves, has
been permitted to perform a great and memorable service to his sovereign
and to his country."

By the death of Mr. Cobden America has lost one of her truest friends,
one who in all this conflict, which has been reflected in England in a
fierce warfare of parties, has been in the thick or the fight, "the
white plume of Navarre." Nothing told more for the American cause in
Europe than the celebrated speech of Cobden, made at the time when the
busy Southerners were trying to show that the war was not for Slavery,
but Free Trade, in which he declared that he had found the Southerners,
and Jefferson Davis himself, whom he had visited, utterly indifferent to
the Free Trade movement. He was accustomed to speak of American affairs
as an American. I well remember his vehement expressions of feeling
concerning the McClellan campaign in Virginia,--in connection with which
he told me that he was at one time travelling with Jefferson Davis and
McClellan together, and that Davis whispered to him, that, in case of
war, "That man [McClellan] is one of the first we should put into
service." I thought Mr. Cobden inclined to attribute McClellan's
failures to something worse than incapacity. But this is only one
instance of the way in which he followed our war-steps, and was
interested in the subordinate questions which are usually interesting
only to Americans. It is with a melancholy pleasure that we now know
that hi