no pains to check the growing feeling of hostility in the breasts of his subjects, but contents himself to-day with taking credit with us for not gratifying it, as, to-morrow, he may take credit with his own subjects for giving way to it. In such a state of things it is not to be wondered at that men hitherto the most pacific in this country are thinking how they can best defend their homes, wives, children, and property, and that, at no small inconvenience, thousands are volunteering their service as a home militia. We are glad to see the movement so well afoot, and hope it may spread until the English soil is so covered with armed men that a Frenchman would as little dare to come here on a warlike errand as he would to thrust his ungloved hand into a hornets’ nest. THE COMMERCIAL TREATY WITH FRANCE (1860). =Source.=--_The Greville Memoirs_, edited by Henry Reeve, C.B., vol. viii., pp. 290–292, 293, 294. (Longmans, Green and Co., 1888.) _January 24._--Clarendon called on me yesterday and told me various things more or less interesting about passing events, about Cobden and the Commercial Treaty. Cobden went over to Paris with letters from Palmerston to Cowley, begging Cowley would give him all the aid he could in carrying out his object of persuading the leading people there to adopt Free Trade principles, saying he went without any mission and as “a free lance.” Cowley did what he could for him, and he went about his object with great zeal, meanwhile putting himself in correspondence with Gladstone, who eagerly backed him up, but all this time nothing was said to the Cabinet on the subject. At length one day Walewski sent for Cowley, and asked him whether he was to understand that Cobden was an agent of the British Government, and authorised by it to say all he was saying in various quarters. Cowley denied all knowledge of Cobden’s proceedings, but wrote a despatch to John Russell stating what had occurred, and at the same time a private letter, saying he did not know whether he would wish such a despatch to be recorded, and therefore to number it and place it in the Foreign Office, or put it in the fire as he thought fit. John Russell accepted the despatch, and at the same time told him he might endorse whatever Cobden did in the matter of commercial engagements.