Cobden entered the House of Commons in 1841, and, from his first speech, delivered five days after the opening of the session, was an acknowledged power in Parliament. He compelled attention even from an unfriendly audience, by his thorough mastery of the subject and by the directness and boldness with which he charged upon the ranks of his adversaries. His methods of address were new in the House; but it soon came to be universally conceded that he was one of the most powerful debaters in Parliament. It is the unique distinction of Cobden among English orators that he converted to his views a government long opposed to him, and finally persuaded a Prime-Minister to reverse his policy and become champion of the very cause he had formerly condemned. In the March of 1845 Cobden thought the time had come for the appointment of a select committee to inquire into the causes of the prevailing agricultural distress. It was in moving for such a committee that he made the speech selected for this collection. That the argument made a great impression may be inferred from Mr. Morley’s account of its effect on Peel. “The Prime-Minister,” he says, “had followed every sentence with earnest attention; his face grew more and more solemn as the argument proceeded. At length he crumpled up the notes which he had been taking, and was heard by an onlooker who was close by to say to Mr. Sidney Herbert who sat next him on the bench: ‘You must answer this, for I cannot.’ And in fact Mr. Sidney Herbert did make the answer while Peel listened in silence.” During the summer of 1845 the agitation went on without any very obvious results. Indeed the cause seemed to be making no headway in Parliament, and Mr. Disraeli, in one of his characteristic phrases, spoke of the appeals, varied even by the persuasive ingenuity of Mr. Cobden, as a “wearisome iteration.” But Cobden meantime felt sure of his ground. Speaking to one of those immense multitudes, “which,” he said, “could only be assembled in ancient Rome to witness the brutal conflicts of men, or can now be found in Spain to witness the brutal conflicts of animals,” he exclaimed: “What, if you could get into the innermost minds of the ministers, would you find them thinking as to the repeal of the Corn Laws? I know it as well as though I were in their hearts. It is this: they are afraid that the Corn Law cannot be maintained—no, not a rag of it, during a period of scarcity prices, of a famine season, such as we had in ’39, ’40, and ’41. They know it. They are prepared, when such a time comes, to abolish the Corn Laws, and they have made up their minds to it. There is no doubt in the world of it. They are going to repeal it, as I told you,—mark my words,—at a season of distress. That distress may come; aye, three weeks of showery weather when the wheat is in bloom or ripening, would repeal these Corn Laws.”