[Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire by James Wycliffe Headlam]@TWC D-Link bookBismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire CHAPTER XVI 22/47
In 1865 he had entered Bismarck's service.
He had acquired a peculiar enmity to the Cobden Club, and looked on that institution as the subtle instrument of a deep-laid plot to persuade other nations to adopt a policy which was entirely for the benefit of England.
He drew attention to Cobden's words--"All we desire is the prosperity and greatness of England." We may in fact look on the Cobden Club and the principles it advocated from two points of view.
Either they are, as Bucher maintained, simply English and their only result will be the prosperity of England, or they are merely one expression of a general form of thought which we know as Liberalism; it was an attempt to create cosmopolitan institutions and to induce German politicians to take their economic doctrines from England, just as a few years before they had taken their political theories.
In either case these doctrines would be very distasteful to Bismarck, who disliked internationalism in finance as much as he did in constitutional law or Socialist propaganda. Bismarck in adopting Protection was influenced, not by economic theory, but by the observation of facts.
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