As a young man, Cobden was a successful commercial traveller who became co-owner of a highly profitable calico printing factory in Sabden but lived in Manchester, a city with which he would become strongly identified.

His relative, noting the lad's passionate addiction to study, solemnly warned him against indulging such a taste, as likely to prove a fatal obstacle to his success in commercial life.

[citation needed] In 1828, Cobden set up his own business with Sheriff and Gillet, partly with capital from John Lewis, acting as London agents for Fort Brothers, Manchester calico printers.

He devoted about three months to this tour, passing rapidly through the seaboard states and the adjacent portion of Canada, and collecting as he went large stores of information respecting the condition, resources and prospects of the nation.

According to historian Asa Briggs, Cobden repeatedly promised that repeal would settle four great problems simultaneously: First, it would guarantee the prosperity of the manufacturer by affording him outlets for his products.

Peel's Tory party, catching at this hint, threw themselves into a frantic state of excitement, and when Cobden attempted to explain that he meant official, not personal responsibility, he was drowned out.

He referred to invitations he had received from France, Prussia, Austria, Russia and Spain and added, Well, I will, with God's assistance during the next twelve months, visit all the large states of Europe, see their potentates or statesmen, and endeavour to enforce those truths which have been irresistible at home.

I feel that I could succeed in making out a stronger case for the prohibitive nations of Europe to compel them to adopt a freer system than I had here to overturn our protection policy.He visited in succession France, Spain, Italy, Germany and Russia, and was honoured everywhere he went.

In October 1850 he wrote a letter to Joseph Sturge, claiming that in the last 25 years "you will find that we have been incomparably the most sanguinary nation on earth... in China, in Burma, in India, New Zealand, the Cape, Syria, Spain, Portugal, Greece, etc, there is hardly a country, however remote, in which we have not been waging war or dictating our terms at the point of a bayonet."

[citation needed] Karl Marx wrote "And without total abandonment of the law of the Koran [argues opposition MP Cobden], it was impossible to put the Christians of Turkey upon an equality with the Turks.

On the dissolution which followed Lord Palmerston's defeat, Cobden became candidate for Huddersfield, but the voters of that town gave the preference to his opponent, who had supported the Russian war and approved of the proceedings at Canton.

Cobden was thus relegated to private life, and retiring to his country house at Dunford, he spent his time in perfect contentment in cultivating his land and feeding his pigs.

Lord Palmerston was again prime minister, and having discovered that the advanced liberal party was not so easily "crushed" as he had apprehended, he made overtures of reconciliation, and invited Cobden and Thomas Milner Gibson to become members of his government.

On his arrival in London he called on Lord Palmerston, and with the utmost frankness told him that he had opposed and denounced him so frequently in public, and that he still differed so widely from his views, especially on questions of foreign policy, that he could not, without doing violence to his own sense of duty and consistency, serve under him as minister.

After a good deal of time spent in these preliminary and unofficial negotiations, the question of a treaty of commerce between the two countries having entered into the arena of diplomacy, Cobden was requested by the British government to act as their plenipotentiary in the matter in conjunction with Henry Wellesley, 1st Earl Cowley, their ambassador in France.

He was, moreover, assailed with great violence by a powerful section of the British press, while the large number of minute details with which he had to deal in connection with proposed changes in the French tariff, involved a tax on his patience and industry which would have daunted a less resolute man.

One strong motive which had impelled him to engage in this enterprise was his anxious desire to establish more friendly relations between Britain and France, and to dispel those feelings of mutual jealousy and alarm which were so frequently breaking forth and jeopardizing peace between the two countries.

But while he was in the midst of the negotiations, Lord Palmerston brought forward in the House of Commons a measure for fortifying the naval arsenals of Britain, which he introduced in a warlike speech pointedly directed against France, as the source of danger of invasion and attack, against which it was necessary to guard.

In 1862 he published his pamphlet entitled The Three Panics, the object of which was to trace the history and expose the folly of those periodical visitations of alarm as to French designs with which Britain had been afflicted for the preceding fifteen or sixteen years.

[23] When the American Civil War threatened to break out in the United States, Cobden was deeply distressed, but after the conflict became inevitable his sympathies were wholly with the Union because the Confederacy was fighting for slavery.

Disraeli said that the verdict of posterity would be that Cobden was the greatest political character that the pure middle class of this country had yet produced,[33][34] and that he "was an ornament to the House of Commons and an honour to England.

He is above all", he added, "in our eyes the representative of those sentiments and those cosmopolitan principles before which national frontiers and rivalries disappear; whilst essentially of his country, he was still more of his time; he knew what mutual relations could accomplish in our day for the prosperity of peoples.

The years of reconstruction following World War II saw a renewed fashion for government intervention in international trade but, starting in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher in the UK (under the influence of Enoch Powell via Keith Joseph) and Ronald Reagan in the U.S. led a revival of laissez-faire that, as of 2006[update], holds some sway in mainstream economic thinking.

He perceived that the rest of the world should follow Britain's example: "if you abolish the corn-laws honestly, and adopt free trade in its simplicity, there will not be a tariff in Europe that will not be changed in less than five years" (January 1846).

[46] Cobden "symbolized the liberal vision of a peaceful, prosperous global order held together by the benign forces of Free Trade" like no other nineteenth century figure.

What they owed to him and to themselves was to make it clear in the sight of all men that they meant to hold fast to the heritage which he, perhaps more than any other individual, won for them; and that the fruits of the battle which he waged against tremendous odds should not be lightly wrested from them.

He urged what he called "the proletariat" in all countries to overthrow society by a violent revolution, to destroy the middle classes and all employers of labour, whom he denounced as capitalists and slave drivers.

[53] In 1966 the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson attacked Philip Snowden for holding the views of "Puritan Cobdenism" which "prevented any expansionist action to relieve unemployment" by the government during the Great Depression.

[58] Outside the Wool Exchange, between the ground floor arches, are carved portraits of notable people, including Cobden (the others are Titus Salt, Stephenson, Watt, Arkwright, Jacquard, Gladstone and Palmerston and (facing Bank Street) Raleigh, Drake, Columbus, Cook and Anson).

Flanking the porched entrance below the tower are statues of Bishop Blaise, the patron saint of woolcombers, and King Edward III, who greatly promoted the wool trade.