Apart from instances such as the perfidy to Cobden, Mr. Delane was a great editor, determining the fluctuating policy of the _Times_ (the policy of the ascendancy of prevailing opinion, right or wrong), selecting leading articles and defining the lines to be taken by the writers. Robert Lowe (afterwards Lord Sherbrooke) received directions which might themselves be printed as leaders in brief. As it was Mr. Lowe's custom to throw Mr. Delane's letters into his paper basket, they came into the hands of his butterman, who, having practical curiosity, took them to Mr. James Beal, who, upon the advice of Mr. Bright, sent them back to Mr. Lowe. All who saw the letters were surprised at the fidelity of the articles as they appeared in the _Times_ to Mr. Delane's preconceived comprehensive, explicit, and well-defined tenor. It was a favourite story told against Cobden by his adversaries, that when he visited the Central Illinois Railway, the company gave free tickets to residents near each station, that the seeming crowd of travellers might impose on Cobden to report well on its prospects. It is what sharp business Americans might be supposed to do. But it did not impose on the popular traveller, whom many naturally strove to see. The chief of the company was candid to him* Mr. Morley has made clear that what did influence Cobden was the prospect of advancing the welfare of emigrants abroad. At the Great Exhibition of 1851 a belief arose that international commerce would increase. A friend of mine, Mr. Allsop, like Cobden, lost a large fortune by premature enthusiasm. Mr. Cobden's was a like error, but a generous one. On the night of Cobden's last speech in Rochdale, I was one of the audience in the great Mill Room in which he spoke. He sent to me a note from the platform. It was the last I received from him. I was that night more conscious than ever before of his wonderful self-possession in speaking. He held up as it were, in the air, a chief sentence as he spoke it, and supplied, before he left it, the qualification he saw it needed, or the amplification he saw it required, so that malignity could not pervert it, nor ignorance misunderstand it. After making the longest speech of his life to the largest audience he had ever met in one room, he was taken to the house of a friend, where he was kept standing on the cold marble hearth in a fireless room, while his friends greeted him until late that November night. To a man of Cobden's temperament standing is painful after mental exhaustion. A cold followed the fireless reception. I knew in Birmingham a speaker of great promise, Mr. J. H. Chamberlain (unrelated to Mr. Joseph Chamberlain) who was surrounded by his friends after a long and brilliant lecture, and when at last he sat down, he died.