himself and the accomplished Finance minister, and the deep-wounding retorts of Mr. Gladstone lighted up the independent seats with electrical cheering. It seemed as if the idea of comparison between the two could not be borne.
Mr. Cobden's letter on the law of blockade will have a deeper effect than his pamphlet; and it is impossible to deny that his positions in the one case are much sounder than in the other, while his conclusions are much more lucidly and forcibly reasoned out We may safely infer that Mr. Cobden's arguments have given a blow to the present state of the law, which followed up, as all such clearly-directed blows ever are, from other quarters, will have its effect in some early modification of that barbarous practice of war.
The "duel," as it is called, between the two steel-coated ships in America has given a new turn to the war feeling of England. The frightful destruction—equally frightful in its extent and rapidity—which the Merrimac made so long as she had to do only with "wooden walls," and the certainty, now made terribly clear by an actual engagement, that one of these floating iron monsters can sweep a whole wooden fleet from the
