Now, last year our imports from Russia were larger than usual, and another house, taking an average year, had made them £11,000,000. In that calculation, the imports of wheat were taken at £2,000,000 instead of £4,000,000, and that made the difference. He was also credibly informed that Russian produce to the value of about £1,000,000 came down the Vistula to the Prussian ports of the Baltic, and was shipped thence to this country; so that our imports from Russia averaged about £12,000,000 sterling per annum, and included among them articles of primary importance to our manufactures. How was machinery to work, and how were locomotives to travel, without tallow to grease their wheels? (A laugh.) Look, too, at the imports of linseed to the value of £1,300,000. No persons were more interested than honourable gentlemen opposite in the reduction of the price of the food of cattle. Then take the articles of flax and hemp. There were districts in the West Riding which would suffer very serious injury and great distress if we should go to war and cut off our intercourse with Russia. (Hear.) Even with regard to the article of Russian iron, which entered into consumption at Sheffield, he was told it would be hardly possible to manufacture some of the finer descriptions of cutlery if the supply of Russian iron were interfered with.” We shall not here take the trouble of criticising Mr Cobden’s figures, but take them as they stand, although they are exaggerated enough. His argument is obviously, that we must submit to any amount of aggression which Russia may choose to make upon neutral countries, and even upon our own Indian possessions, because that country supplies us yearly with thirteen millions’ worth of raw materials and food! The same was the humiliating position which the men of Tyre and Sidon, as recorded in Scripture, occupied towards Herod, when “they came of one accord to him, and having made Blastus, the king’s chamberlain, their friend, desired peace, _because their country was nourished by the king’s country_.” How, asks Mr Cobden, is machinery to work without tallow to grease the wheels? We are to have an anti-war cry from the farmers for the lack of Russian linseed; the West Riding of Yorkshire is to be stirred up into insurrection by the want of flax and hemp; and the fine cutlers of Sheffield cannot get on without the £70,000 worth of iron which they import from Russia! The main reliance of the peace-at-any-price party, we have no doubt, rests upon the probability of high prices of food, and their hope of producing in the minds of the masses the impression that the cause of those high prices is mainly the interruption of our usual imports of grain from the Russian ports of the Baltic and the Black Sea.