Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/306

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Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.

selves up. He summoned them to surrender, and the door was unbarred; but Pat Lowe, who had rejoined him, called out, "Dear Mr. Gurwood, they will murder you!" and as he entered he was seized round the neck and expected a sword in his body; but he found that the person who had seized him round the neck was the governor, and that he yielded himself his prisoner. Gurwood conducted him to Lord Wellington on the ramparts, who said, "Did you take him?" and on his replying that he did, handed to him the governor's sword, with the words: "Take it, you are the proper person to wear it." He wore it ever afterwards.

It seemed to be the end and aim of Mr. Cobden's book to cry down military men and cry up cotton-spinners and calico-printers. Military men may be good and bad, and cotton-spinners and calico-printers may be more good than bad. But the mistake was that Mr. Cobden and some others after Peel's panegyric assumed Mr. Cobden to be not only a great, but a universal genius; which of course was a mistake. He was indeed an able man, and an eloquent man in a masculine kind of eloquence, and I agree with Mr. Forster, that in dividing the boroughs I should prefer Mr. Cobden's plan of the single member constituencies to the