I confess that for fifteen years my efforts in education, and my hopes of success in establishing a system of national education, have always been associated with the idea of coupling the education of this country with the religious communities which exist.

He was therefore deeply disappointed and distressed to find the old feeling of distrust still actively fomented by the press and some of the leading politicians of the country. First publications

In 1835 he publiRichard Cobdend his first pamphlet entitled England Ireland and America by a Manchester Manufacturer. His only son died to Cobden's inexpressible grief at the age of fifteen in 1856.

He has been called "the greatest classical-liberal thinker on international affairs" by historian Ralph Raico. Richard Cobden (3 June 1804 – 2 April 1865) was a British manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman associated with John Bright in the formation of the Anti-Corn Law League as well as with the Cobden–Chevalier Treaty.