[This is Chapter Fifteen of Murphey’s book Understanding the Modern Predicament.]

 

 

Chapter Fifteen

 

COBDEN, BRIGHT, PALMERSTON AND WORLD WAR I

 

            As we look back on World War I after these many years, we lose track of the enthusiasms and animosities that made our grandparents think it so worthy a cause, and we can hardly avoid thinking of the war as having been one of the more senseless agonies mankind has ever visited upon itself. It was a ghastly war; and it is amazing that it was fought without even a major principle or a genuine conflict of interests being involved. It was, instead, the product of a massive neurosis.

The present chapter, as the reader knows, is one of a series in which I am discussing some of the more obvious reflections of the modern crisis. World War I could hardly be omitted from such a series. It was a symptom of the cosmic immaturity that resides within even the civilized man; and it tells us a lot about our intellectual failures. But before I discuss the war from this perspective, I will want to take time to review its specific origins and to summarize briefly the debate that has raged among historians over the question of fault. These will then serve as a concrete backdrop for my more general discussion.

The event that sparked the war occurred at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, when a Serbian conspirator from the Pan-Slavic "Black Hand Society" shot and killed the heir-apparent to the throne of Austria-Hungary's Dual Monarchy, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and his wife (while, tr1vially but interestingly, they were on their way to celebrate their fourteenth wedding anniversary).

The Black Hand Society is known to have acted in complicity with various Serbian officials, and the conspiracy may even have extended to some members of the Russian government. The Society's existence was part of the Greater Serbian agitation that at least in part had originated in the ethnic nationalism that swept across Europe during and after the Napoleonic era. The agitation had been a long-standing problem for Austria-Hungary, a country that under Metternich had been a major European power but that had been seriously weakened by exclusion from Germany as a result of the Austro-Prussian War in 1866. The exclusion had made Austria-Hungary prey to the struggle of nationalities that eventually led to the Sarajevo assassinations and that in turn motivated the Dual Monarchy's severe reaction.

The historians of the period disagree over a great deal of what led up to the assassinations and over what happened after them. Some argue that Germany and Austria-Hungary used the Archduke's murder as a pretext to launch a general European war that those countries had hoped for for other reasons. Other historians say these countries only wanted strong diplomatic steps and a limited war with Serbia that would stop the agitation. At Versailles after World War I, the victors imposed the first of these views as the official theory of the war.

The events show that Germany gave her ally pretty much a blank check during the first few days after the assassinations, but later tried to keep Austria-Hungary from going too far. One of the points of argument among the historians is whether the eventual restraint was either timely or genuine; but in any case the Dual Monarchy didn't heed the restraint. It went ahead with its declaration of war and mobilization against Serbia.

Even at this juncture, the conflict might have remained restricted if Russia hadn't mobilized to support Serbia. It is significant that many Europeans considered a general mobilization equivalent to a declaration of war. Again, historians disagree -- first over Russia's justification for mobilizing and then over the importance other countries should have assigned to it. Some historians assert, in fact, that the mobilization carried out a scheme by pro-war factions in Russia and France in favor of a general war that would hopefully gain the Dardanelles for Russia and Alsace-Lorraine for the French. Others see the mobilization as a justified intervention on behalf of Serbia in keeping with Russia's "traditional role" as protector of the slavs.

Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm held back long enough to send the Tsar an ultimatum demanding that the mobilization be abandoned. When Russia continued, Germany went to war. And the way it did so is itself the subject of one of the main points of contention; Germany followed a strategy that had been worked out for it years earlier by Chief of Staff Alfred von Schlieffen that was designed to eliminate Germany's geographical problem of a two-front war. The plan called for an immediate attack through Belgium and northern France to defeat the French before the Russians {who were allied with France) could have time to enter the war from the east. This violation of Belgian neutrality gave rise to world-wide revulsion against Germany, and provided at least a pretext for England's intervention. Historians disagree over whether the English government under Asquith and Grey was responding genuinely to the attack on Belgium; some think it used the attack to justify England's entering the war pursuant to secret commitments to France and Russia.

From this point, the war was underway. Millions died; countless others were gassed and maimed; and the setting was established for World War II. But even now there is a general inability by intelligent world opinion to say why it all happened. As we have seen, almost every nuance of the circumstances that led up to the war is subject to conflicting interpretation. These nuances are combined together into three basic theories: the theory, adopted at Versailles, that Germany plotted the war; the view that France and Russia plotted it; and what we might call the "tinderbox" theory.1 

At Versailles, the Allies' “Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War" declared that "the responsibility for it lies wholly with the Powers which declared war in pursuance of a policy of aggression, the concealment of which gives to the origin of this war the character of a dark conspiracy against the peace of Europe." This is a view that Camille Bloch has endorsed in The Causes of the World War: "William II and the German General Staff, although they had maintained a pacific attitude during the recent Balkan wars..., were fully aware of the unpreparedness of France, Russia, and England; they believed that the moment for aggression had come, and determined to seize the first favorable opportunity to adopt a policy of force."2

The exactly opposite conclusion -- that France and Russia had plotted the war -- was argued by Harry Elmer Barnes in The Genesis of the World War. He said that "for several years previous to the outbreak of the World War, Izvolski (the Russian ambassador to France) had become convinced that the most important point in Russian foreign policy was the securing of the Straits, and that they could only be obtained by a European war." He continued that "Sazonov was converted to this view by December, 1913, and he expressed himself as believing that with British help, France and Russia could easily dispose of Germany and put an end to her existence as a first-class power... To prepare for such an incident, the Russians had encouraged Serbian plots against Austria, supplied the Serbians with arms, and twice promised them Russian aid against Austria. Russian army, and possibly diplomatic, circles knew of the Sarajevo plot in advance and gave it their approval."3 Barnes also tied in France through its Premier and later President, Raymond Poincare; he said that in 1912 Izvolski ”was joined in his program by... Poincare (whose) dominating ambition was the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine," which had been lost to Germany in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.

Another historian of this same school of thought is Erich Brandenburg, one of Germany's leading historians. In From Bismarck to the World War, Brandenburg said that "so far as guilt can be brought home to individual personalities in the world war, these two men {Izvolski and Poincare) stand convicted... It was they, not Germany, who wished for conquests at the expense of others.”4

I have called the third interpretation of the war the "tinder-box" theory. It says that Europe stumbled into the war after years of arms-race and mutual suspicion without anyone's premeditation. A group of French and German historians has concluded that "the documents do not permit attributing a premeditated desire for a European war on the part of any government or people in 1914. Distrust was at a peak and ruling circles were dominated by the idea that war was inevitable. Each one accused the other of aggressive intentions; each accepted the risk of war and saw its only hope for security in the alliance system and the development of armament."5  Consistently with this, Raymond Aron says in The Century of Total War that "search was made... for the men who had knowingly embarked on aggression. They were not discovered or, in any case, they were not discovered in the simple guise of storybook villains."6

I have made a list of some of the main open questions left by the welter of conflicting interpretations. When we see that they often involve subtle questions of judgment, we can understand why it is that historians will never evaluate them all the same way:

  • Whether Izvolski and Poincare intended a general war.
  • Whether Germany plotted war.
  • The extent of Serbian and even Russian complicity in the Sarajevo killings.
  • Whether (as Sir Edward Grey in England so strongly asserted) Germany was actually more nationalist, imperialist and militarist than the other major powers in Europe.
  • Whether Russian mobilization was justified on behalf of Serbia.
  • Whether Kaiser Wilhelm's pre-war role was militaristic and bombastic -- or was instead that of a peace-maker.
  • How closely England was allied before the war with France and through France with Russia.
  • Which nation or bloc was responsible for the arms race that preceded the war -- or whether exclusive blame can be assessed at all.
  • Whether it was reasonable to understand Russian mobilization as equivalent to a declaration of war.
  • Whether Germany's invasion of Belgium caused England to enter the war or whether the invasion was just used as a pretext by Asquith and Grey.
  • Whether von Schlieffen's strategy was morally justifiable or was militarily necessary.
  • Whether it was reasonable for Austria-Hungary to think that a war with Serbia could be localized.
  • Whether Germany was wrong in giving Austria-Hungary a free diplomatic hand, and whether Germany's eventual restraint was timely and genuine.
  • The justification, if any, for the Pan-Slavic agitation.
  • Whether Austria-Hungary was justified in desiring war with Serbia after the assassinations.

To list these issues is to suggest that the causes of the war pose a very difficult intellectual question. It is remarkable that in England and the United States public opinion was able to reach so overwhelming a consensus that Germany was the villain. In his memoirs, Sir Edward Grey said that Germany had possessed a criminal nature that had been a threat to European civilization.7 Woodrow Wilson saw World War I as a war "to make the world safe for democracy." But these conclusions were by no means clearly supportable; and since they weren't they seem to reflect hysteria and the effects of massive propaganda. As we place the war in perspective, it will be worthwhile to note precisely the closed-mindedness of millions of people, their dogmatic certainty about something that will always be inextricably complicated to historians, and their enthusiastic willingness to die without any real attempt at understanding. The elements of human nature that were involved seem timeless. I am reminded of the people who rejected Balavignus' suggestions about the plague in the fourteenth century, since they too died in large numbers while willfully distorting reality.

 

Intellectual Precursors

 

The war wasn't an unrelated event; it occurred in a civilization in which the preconditions for it had been established well in advance. These preconditions included a savage strain of intellectuality that had raised the tensions within Europe to a frantic pitch. Countless viewpoints screamed in Jacobinical excess. Many glorified war and "direct action."

Julien Benda' s famous The Betrayal of the Intellectuals describes this intellectual milieu in detail. The following passage summarizes the thesis of his book: "Today political passions show a degree of universality, of coherence, of homogeneousness, of precision, of continuity, of preponderance, in relation to other passions, unknown until our time. They have become conscious of themselves to an extent never seen before... All are furnished with an apparatus of ideology whereby, in the name of science, they proclaim the supreme value of their action and its historical necessity. On the surface and in the depths,... political passions have today reached a point of perfection never before known in history.”8 With considerable anguish, he cried that “today there is scarcely a mind in Europe which is not affected -- or thinks itself affected -- by racial or class or national passion, and most often by all three." (Emphasis added) He said that "in the last half century France has possessed a fanatically nationalist literature." And he saw that "the cult of success, I mean the teaching which says that when a will is successful that fact alone gives it a moral value, whereas the will which fails is for that reason alone deserving of contempt... is professed by many a modern teacher in political life (it may be said, by all in Germany since Hegel, and by a large number in France since de Maistre)." He wrote of the "denunciation of liberalism... by the vast majority of contemporary men of letters."

This milieu raised the State high and looked upon war as a spiritual elevation. "The modern realists," Benda said, "are the moralists of realism. For them, the act which makes the State strong is invested with a moral character..., and this whatever the act may be. The evil which serves politics ceases to be evil and becomes good." He added that "our moralists who sneer at pacific civilization and extol a warlike life, do so because the former seems a dull sort of a life to them and the latter an opportunity for sensations." He wrote between the world wars, and he concluded that "this humanity is heading for the greatest and most perfect war of classes." In the intellectuality Benda described, we can spot, among other things, the origins of Hitler's contempt for "the peaceful contest of nations" and for bourgeois life. This was a contempt that caused Hitler to cry out "Why couldn't I have been born a hundred years earlier? Say at the time of the Wars of Liberation when a man, even without a 'business,' was really worth something?"

Benda made it clear that such ideas weren't simply German. Nevertheless, the observations by Reinhold Aris in his History of Political Thought in Germany are illuminating. "One of the favorite heroes of the Storm and Stress poets was the noble criminal who struggled against the law as the incarnation of a narrow-minded rationalism."9 He says that "in Schleiermacher's thought the organic concept allied itself with the national idea and thus all the strength which could be derived from the concept of an organic state was transferred to the national movement." He writes of "Hegel's glorification of the Prussian military state as the embodiment of the world spirit." Muller, in turn, "uses his philosophical principle of antagonism for the justification of war... In his opinion a state can only thrive if it is continuously challenged by other states and it is itself only the product of war."

Nietzsche expressed the same thought in Twilight of the Idols. "Out of life's school of war: What does not destroy me, makes me stronger."10  "One has renounced the great life when one renounces war" (his emphasis). In 1880, Nietzsche described the situation in Europe: "All states are now ranged against each other: they presuppose their neighbor's bad disposition and their own good disposition." To which he added two years later that "I welcome all signs that a more manly, a warlike, age is about to begin, an age which, above all, will give honor to valor once again. For this age shall prepare the way for one yet higher... For, believe me, the secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously!" (his emphasis). Benda later noted Nietzsche as among those who came to equate justice with power.

 

Cobden, Bright and Palmerston

 

If a student of the causes of World War I becomes enmeshed in the detail of events after the turn of the century, he loses the perspective that he could have if he were to look at the war in light of the attitudes and events of fifty or sixty years earlier. If we read the biographies of Richard Cobden and John Bright -- the two leading members of the Manchester School in England whose political activity spanned the middle forty years of the nineteenth century --, we will notice a striking similarity between the international issues of their time and those that later culminated in World War I. We will also find that their peace-oriented and yet thoroughly practical philosophy is an excellent touchstone by which to measure the voids that led to war.

The emphasis in Bright's political life was on democracy. In keeping with this, he associated peace with the extension of the franchise. George Trevelyan says that "he regarded our warlike foreign policy as the result of our aristocratic system of Government."ll  In the second half of Bright's life (following his fight alongside Cobden for the abolition of the tariff on grains), he devoted himself to extending the franchise.

Richard Cobden had a somewhat different emphasis during the second half of his political life. Cobden avidly sought a policy of free trade, which he saw as integral to a world-wide order in which peaceable commerce rather than

warlike suspicion would be the nexus among nations. He referred to "the question of Free Trade as the means -- and, I believe the only human means -- of effecting universal and permanent peace."12  John MacCunn has painted a broad picture of Cobden's vision: "It was not an insular or one-sided Free Trade that could content him -- though he never hesitated to prefer that to Protection. His expectations went out to nothing less than a complete international division of labor, under which the production of the whole world would be maximized, and the wants of each several country supplied on a basis of a free international exchange of commodities... Above all, it was to be not only the harbinger but the cause of Peace, and the breaking down of hostile barriers between nation and nation. 'Free Trade!' he cries in one of his most vehement passages, ‘What is it?' Why, breaking down the barriers that separate nations; these barriers behind which nestle the feelings of pride, revenge, hatred, and jealousy, which every now and then burst their bounds and deluge whole countries with blood!"13

Cobden’s philosophy included several implications. He favored the international arbitration of disputes. He considered colonies "the costly appendage of an aristocratic government." And he argued that the concept of "the balance of power" was a "chimera."14 Cobden observed about the "balance of power" (which was a concept that bred distrust and caused the system of alliances) that "it is not a fallacy, a mistake, an imposture, it is an undescribed, indescribable, incomprehensible nothing; mere words, conveying to the mind not ideas, but sounds." Further, he opposed the idea that England should police the world. He stood against the existence of a large standing army, opposed the colonization of India, sought to abolish the need for passports, worked for the reduction of armaments, was a vigorous critic of England's involvement in the Crimean War, and served successfully as England's representative in negotiating a commercial treaty with France based on free trade principles.

To Cobden during those years, Prime Minister Palmerston was an apt symbol of the entire warlike syndrome. R. A. J. Walling gives William Gladstone, Richard Cobden and John Bright credit for having done "more than anything else to check the mad jingo dance in which Palmerston beckoned on a panic-stricken country to war with France."15 Trevelyan gives us an illustration: "The first two years of the new Whig cabinet (June 1859-1861) saw a terrible danger draw near and recede. The panic-mongers, headed by Palmerston himself, long held the country on the verge of war with France, for no reason except the utterly false belief that Napoleon intended to attack us." Cobden argued that England was itself a source of the distrust: "I sometimes hear it very complacently said, 'everybody knows that England is only armed in self-defense, and in the interests of peace.' But when France looks at our 500 ships of war, our 180 war steamers, and hears of our great preparations at Alderney, Jersey, and other points close to her shores, she has very different suspicions." He wrote an essay on the subject, which he summarized by saying that "it has been demonstrated in the preceding pages, by evidence drawn from our own official statements, totally irrespective of the French accounts, that, as a nation, we have borne false witness against our neighbors; that, without a shadow of proof or justification, we have accused them, repeatedly, during a long series of years, of meditating an unprovoked attack on our shores, in violation of every principle of international law, and in contempt of all the obligations of morality and honour.” He pointed out that “for a century and a half we have been fighting, with occasional intermissions, for the Balance of Power, but I do not remember that it has ever been made the subject of peaceful diplomacy, with a view to the organization of the whole of Europe." Speaking of the Crimean War, he added that "in the present case, our Government has entered into war on the assumption that the European balance has been, and still is, endangered by the ambition of Russia." According to Trevelyan, Cobden and Bright "worked together between 1846 and 1854 (for) resistance to military expenditure and to Palmerston's interference in European affairs which caused it."

From all of this, we see that the syndrome that carried Europe into World War I had existed for a good many years, despite the presence of men such as Cobden and Bright who offered a change of philosophy that might have put an end to the madness. The causes of the war are to be found most immediately in the events at and after Sarajevo, but the real underlying factors existed in the intellectual and spiritual void that had caused Europe to turn a deaf ear to constructive alternatives.

 

Some Additional Observations

 

An awareness of the factors that led to World War I is important if we are to understand certain attitudes that have existed during the Cold War since 1945. Classical liberals and Burkean traditionalists hold philosophies that would incline them toward a deep revulsion against Marxism-Leninism. They accordingly have seen the overriding international issue since 1945 as having been the expansionist nature of Communist totalitarianism. Such thinkers see world events since 1945 as similar to the situation during the 1930s when Hitler's expansionist Nazism was the central problem. From this point of view, the problem is not so much one of “distrust” and “misunderstanding” as it is one of a world divided by ideology in which all of the factors we have considered about bourgeois culture and about the intellectuals' alienation from it are pertinent. Although the pre-World War I problems of distrustful nations still exist, they are present as an underlay. Over and above them, we find the struggle between the factions within a profoundly divided civilization.

On the other hand, the very nature of the Left's orientation has caused the Left (including most modern American liberals) to minimize the threat posed by Communism, often to the point of denying it as a problem altogether. When detente was engineered with Peking and Moscow by Richard Nixon in the early 1970s, liberal voices were raised that argued that the entire Cold War had been due far less to a genuine threat from Communist expansion than to a jingoistic perception arising in America.

When this perspective abstracts Communism virtually out of the picture, it comes to see the world's problems in a way that is identical to the way Cobden saw those that existed in the nineteenth century: a balance of power, a lack of mutual understanding, a destructive national pride, profiteering in armaments, and the like. Anyone who sees the world in this way will tend to call for an American foreign policy of conciliation and détente.  Such measures as cultural exchanges are calculated to reduce provincialisms. The Communist "wars of national liberation" around the world are looked upon as simply local civil wars, albeit wearing a superficial mask of ideology -- and it is suggested that American policy should be one of non-intervention.

It is worth noticing this vast difference in perception. A conservative has a difficult time understanding why a liberal sees things as he does; and it is just as hard for a liberal to understand the conservative's system of interpretation. Each starts with different premises about the world, and those premises are related to his overall ideology.

I am myself a classical liberal and I accordingly hold Richard Cobden in considerable esteem. I agree with his understanding of nineteenth century international affairs. And yet, I also agree with the anti-Communist perception of the world following the Second World War. A world that is threatened by expansionist totalitarian ideology is, in my opinion, substantially different from one that is threatened only by the vagaries of the anarchy of nations. At the same time, I would stress that anti-Communists should keep in mind that the pre-World War I neuroses still exist as an underlay. Whenever we can do so consistently with our adversary role in the conflict with Communism, we should try to edge the world a bit closer to Cobden's vision. It will be a tragedy if the energies of the twentieth century are totally absorbed by the need to fight totalitarian forces, with the effect that when those forces no longer occupy the stage we will have made no progress toward solving the syndrome that was so evident before World War I. A program for doing what we can toward "improved understanding," free trade, the international arbitration of disputes, etc., should ideally be developed concomitantly with an anti-Communist policy to the extent that we can do so without giving up our necessary sense of moral outrage over the totalitarian nature of that system.

The difficulty is that our own weakness and division make this impossible. If we enjoyed a deep consensus within our own intellectual culture about the evils of Communism and about the benefits of a classically liberal free society, we would be armed with a spiritual force of our own to meet that of our totalitarian opponents. This would mean that we would be much stronger than we now are. From such a position of strength we could afford some conciliatory measures that might help solve the pre-World War I syndrome. But our actual weakness of mind and of spirit produces a different effect; it means that very little goes truly well for us under any policy, whether militant or conciliatory; and it means that conciliatory measures tend to vitiate such moral force as we are able to muster.

It is doubtful whether Richard Nixon made the characteristic mistake of a "liberal" view of the world. He knew the nature of Communism too well for this. He sought conciliation out of what he considered shrewdness and strength. It wasn't Communism that he misunderstood, but ourselves. His policy overestimated the moral, spiritual condition of the West. We act from division and apathy mixed with some surges of will, and this is hardly a sufficient basis for the dual policy I have mentioned.

There is something else to consider, too. Although we should work toward a Cobden-like resolution of international anarchy, I have no conviction that the world, in its immaturity, is ready for a definitive solution. The civilized base isn't sufficiently present. It would help immensely, of course, if the divisions within modern Western civilization were cured; but even then we couldn't anticipate that humanity, including the people of the United States and Europe, would give up its "direct action" tendencies and its varied attitudes sufficiently to agree upon Cobden's suggestions. The internal barbarization occurring within the West and the civilizational weaknesses of Asia, Africa and Latin America will hardly dissolve in the foreseeable future. This means that the world will retain a substantial amount of turmoil in any case. If Communism were to disappear but the alienation of the intellectual were to remain, countless people would simply throw themselves into new totalitarian movements; and if even so profound a change were to occur as the evaporation of the alienation, the world would still be inhabited by an immature humanity.

Nor can the world be made peaceable by an international "rule of law." There is nothing to make us suppose that today's boundaries reflect a final equilibrium. Tremendous demographic changes are taking place, and submerged peoples are rising. There is nothing about the status quo that suggests that it corresponds with the realities that will exist even so soon as fifty or a hundred years in the future. If a full Kellogg-Briand Pact type of peace is to exist under such circumstances, it will have to be the result of nuclear terror; it certainly won't occur naturally. A system of international law would have no way to adjust demographic pressures. Either it would serve as an instrument of the status quo and find itself perpetually challenged; or it would serve as the cutting edge of change, in which case it would have to perform the impossible task of developing a consensus on the principles that would guide the process of change.

There is no basis, certainly, for world government. The voids within modern civilization are simply too great for us to anticipate that a world government would serve the interests of a classical liberal type of freedom for the individual. Such a government would itself tend to become an instrument of "direct action" for whatever peoples or interests predominated within it. Or if it were to fall under the rein of the idealist, it would tend to become the theocratic instrument of the intelligentsia. For better or for worse, we are left with the traditional system of nation-states.

 

 

NOTES

 

1. These views are well represented in an excellent introductory book: Dwight E. Lee (ed.), The Outbreak of the First World War, Who was Responsible? (Boston: D. C. Heath and Company, 1958).

2. Camille Bloch, The Causes of the World War (London: G. Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1935), pp. 183-191.

3. Harry Elmer Barnes, The Genesis of the World War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929), pp. 372-373, 147.

4. Erich Brandenburg, From Bismarck to the World War (London: Oxford University Press, (1929), pp. 518-523.

5. From James A. Corbett, "France and Germany Agree -- On the Past," Historical Bulletin, XXVIII (March, 1955), pp. 158-162.

6. Raymond Aron, The Century of Total War (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954), quoted in Lee, Qutbreak, p. 69.

7. Sir Edward Grey, Twenty-Five Years (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1925).

8. Julien Benda, The Betrayal of the Intellectua1s (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1930), pp. 22, 1, 43, 116, 81, 85, 140, 145.

9. Reinhold Aris, History of Political Thought in Germany (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1936), pp. 193, 294, 302, 312.

10. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press, 1968), pp. 467, 489, 72, 97.

11. George Macaulay Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913), pp. 273, 283, 178.

12. John Mor1ey, The life of Richard Cobden (London: Chapman and Hall, 1881) , Vol. I, p. 230.

13. John MacCunn, Six Radical Thinkers (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), p.103.

14. Richard Cobden, The Political Writings of Richard Cobden (London: The Cassell & Company, Ltd., 1886), pp. 150, 197, 198, 346, 696-697, 533.

15. R. A. J. Walling (ed.), The Diaries of John Bright (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1931), p. 243.