ABSTRACT
The competition between John Bull and Brother Jonathan was, for Cobden, far more portentous in its implications than other contemporary Victorian preoccupations, such as the Eastern Question or failed revolutions in Europe in 1848. When it came to elementary education, for Cobden the crucial difference was the absence of an established church, for America is after all the only country where religious liberty is understood for there it enters into the opinion of the people It is not understood in this country'. The function of America in the Liberal mind was therefore a subtle one in which the United States was constructed as a social, economic, and political model against which Liberals. Then, it would test English institutions in order to adjust them for survival in the face of growing economic and democratic challenges. American hegemony in the long-term Cobden regarded as inevitable; but in the short term old England might, by prudent reforms, put off her inevitable decline.
