_Slowgoe._ So I see _that_ Cobden has been in France. Wanting to stir up a free trade in frogs, I s’pose. But they’re not such fools; they won’t give up pertecting their native produce like us. He says in his speech to the Frenchmen, “I am not a propagandist.” Now what does he mean by that? _Peabody._ Why, that he doesn’t want to preach free trade to the French. _Tickle._ But the best on it is, he can’t help it. Mr Nutts and I was talking about that afore, warn’t we, Nutts. _Nutts._ The very fact, says I, of Cobden being received as he is by Frenchmen, makes him a propagandist. There he is, with every syllable he says, preaching free trade for the wine-growers, though he doesn’t say a word about it. There he is in the city of Paris ten thousand times bigger conq’ror than Marshal Blucher. Lor’ bless you! the soldiers, poor fellows! never thought of it; but Cobden will prove the worst English general for them. He’s opened the campaign that will knock up their trade. There wasn’t a French soldier, whilst Cobden was talking and the Frenchmen were cheering, that oughtn’t to have felt his musket crumbling away in his arms like dust, and his bayonet melting like in its scabbard. There wasn’t a single French cannon, if it had had any sense at all, that oughtn’t to have groaned as with the bellyache, knowing that, as condemned old iron, it would go to the melting-pot. Then for the Gallic cock--the cock of glory!--the cock that, unlike any decent barndoor fowl, is always for picking out the eyes of nations--the cock that only lives upon a morning feed of bullets--why, after Cobden had made his speech, the poor thing felt his appetite get weaker and weaker for the garbage of glory, and in the end, depend on’t, he’ll live upon corn, without a drop o’ blood mixed in it, like a decent respectable bird, and never think of cock-a-doodle-dooing above all his neighbours. _Nightflit._ Shouldn’t wonder. Why, doesn’t the French paper itself--the _Journal des--des_---- _Peabody._ The _Journal des Débats_--the Government organ. _Nightflit._ Doesn’t it, here, in what it says about Cobden, talk as if it was ashamed of the business of the customhouse officers rumpling and tousling everybody as steps into the country, for smuggled goods? Turning people upside down, and shaking ’em like so many pickpockets.