A Passion for Meddling
Richard Cobden questioned both the wisdom and the motives of politicians who intervene on foreign soil.
1835-1836
© Hubert Śmietanka, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.5.
A re-enactment of the Battle of Olszynka Grochowska, on February 25th 1831. It followed the November Uprising of 1830, an ill-fated attempt to throw off colonial rule under Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, and was fought in the woods near Grochów just to the east of Warsaw – a victory on the day for the Poles, but they did not pursue their advantage. Russia feared the spread through Poland of western European politics, religion and society, which was understandable given Napoleon’s brief capture of Moscow in 1812, and the litter of broken countries he had left in his wake.
Introduction
At the Vienna Congress in 1815, Napoleon’s former empire was shared out by Britain and other European Powers. A semi-autonomous Kingdom of Poland was allotted to Russia, which Russian troops occupied in response to the November Uprising of 1830-31. Calls grew loud for the British and Turkish Empires to restore ‘the balance of power’, but Richard Cobden heard only arrogant self-preservation.
taken from two pamphlets, one written in 1835 and the other in 1836
IF it were the province of Great Britain to administer justice to all the people of the earth — in other words, if God had given us, as a nation, the authority and the power, together with the wisdom and the goodness, sufficient to qualify us to deal forth His vengeance, then should we be called upon in this case to rescue the weak from the hands of their spoilers.
But do we possess these favoured endowments? Are we armed with the powers of Omnipotence: or, on the contrary, can we discover another people rising into strength with a rapidity that threatens inevitably to overshadow us? Again, do we find ourselves to possess the virtue and the wisdom essential to the possession of supreme power; or, on the other hand, have we not at our side, in the wrongs of a portion of our own people, a proof that we can justly lay claim to neither?* [...]
Two wrongs are likely to have been in Cobden’s mind. A cost of living crisis caused by the Government’s economic policies at home and abroad was causing severe hardship for low income families, especially in industrial towns such as Cobden’s Manchester; Cobden’s tireless and ultimately successful campaign for The Repeal of the Corn Laws established his reputation as one of the country’s most eminent Liberals. And in Part II of England, Ireland and America (1835), Cobden stated plainly that London’s treatment of Ireland ‘presented a grosser spectacle of moral and physical debasement than is to be met with in the whole civilised world’, and that it would have drawn forth a humanitarian intervention from us had any other European nation treated one of its subject peoples so.
