Wealth & Money Quote by Richard Cobden

Cobden’s sentence is a fiscal grenade tossed into the respectable parlor of Victorian “common sense.” It looks like a dry budget maxim, but the intent is unmistakably combative: if households in England and Wales are feeling crushed by taxes, stop blaming abstract necessity and start naming the real, organized appetite of the state. The line “you can only find it” is the tell. He isn’t offering one policy option among many; he’s foreclosing excuses and forcing a binary choice between domestic comfort and imperial muscle.

The subtext is even sharper. By calling the army a “great military establishment” and soldiers “fighting men,” Cobden strips away romance. No “defenders of the realm,” no “glory,” just an industry with payroll. The phrase “in time of peace” functions like an accusation: permanent militarization isn’t protection, it’s an expensive habit. Peace, in his framing, should yield a peace dividend; if it doesn’t, then the establishment has learned how to keep cash flowing without the inconvenience of war.

Context matters. Cobden, a businessman and anti-militarist associated with free trade and the politics of thrift, speaks for a rising middle-class and industrial Britain that resented aristocratic, land-and-empire priorities. His rhetoric ties bread-and-butter taxation directly to geopolitics, translating foreign policy into a household ledger. The move is strategically populist: it recruits taxpayers into anti-imperial skepticism by reframing military “readiness” as a transfer from homes to uniforms.