We had not the good fortune to be present on that occasion; but, from the accounts contained in the morning papers, it must have been an assemblage of a singularly motley kind. There was a considerable muster of Radical members of parliament; the Financial Reform and the Peace Associations were respectively represented; Lord Nugent and Mr Milnes stood forth as delegates from the Bards of Britain; Julian Harney and Mr G. W. M. Reynolds headed a numerous band of Chartists; and Lord Dudley Stuart, as a matter of course, was surrounded by a whiskered phalanx of Poles, Hungarians, Italians, Germans, and Sicilians, each one striving to look more patriotically ferocious than his neighbour. The first sympathetic resolution was moved by a Quaker, and seconded by no less a person than Richard Cobden, who had only been prevented from attending the previous debate in the House of Commons by a swan-hopping expedition on the Thames. Then it was that Mr Cobden first favoured the world with some economical views, so exceedingly novel and startling, as to excite, even in that audience, unequivocal symptoms of incredulity. He set out by laying it down as a general rule, that every separate state ought to be left to the management of its own affairs, without the interference of any foreign power whatever. "If," said he, "this had been a question simply between Hungary and Austria, I should not have appeared here to-day, nor indeed would it have been necessary for any of us to have appeared here to-day. So long as the Hungarians were left to settle their affairs with the government of Vienna, they were perfectly competent to do it, without the interference of the citizens of London." This is intelligible enough. So long as central governments are merely fighting with their own dependencies, there is no room at all, according to Mr Cobden, for interference. It matters not which side prevails: they must be left wholly to themselves. This doctrine could not, we think, have been very acceptable to the Poles; since it amounts to an entire admission that Russia has a right to deal with them at her pleasure; neither is it altogether consistent with our ideas, or interpretation of the law of nations. But it is Cobden's view, and therefore let it pass, to him, then, it mattered nothing whether Goth or Hun prevailed--it was the intervention of Russia that peremptorily called him to the platform. Now we must own, that we cannot understand this sort of reasoning, though it may possibly be suited to the capacities of a Manchester audience. If, as many people no doubt conscientiously believe, Austria was trampling upon the liberties of a brave and loyal people, not only justice, but humanity demands that our sympathies should be enlisted on their side. We cannot acquiesce in a doctrine which would have left the Greeks (lamentably small sense as they have shown of the benefits of liberty) to toil on for ever under the grievous yoke of the Ottoman: nor are we prepared