The labourer,in the first place,if fairly represented by Cobbett,had none of the bitter feeling against the nobility which smouldered in the French peasantry,Cobbett looked back as fondly to the surroundings of his youth as any nobleman could look back to Eton or to his country mansion.He remembered the 'sweet country air'round Crooksbury Hill,the song of birds,and the rambles through heather and woodland.He loved the rough jovial sports;bull-baiting and prizefighting and single-stick play.He had followed the squire's hounds on foot,and admired without jealousy the splendid gardens of the bishop's palace at Farnham.Squire and parson were an intrinsic part of the general order of things.The state of the English working classes was,he often declares,the happiest that could be imagined,102and he appeals in confirmation to his own memories.Although,upon enlisting,he had found the army corrupt,he not only loved the soldier for the rest of his life,but shared to the full the patriotic exultation which welcomed the 1st of June and the Nile,Even to the last,he could not stomach the abandonment of the title 'King of France';for so long as it was retained,it encouraged the farmer to tell his son the story of Crecy and Agincourt.103What,then,alienated Cobbett?
Briefly,the degradation of the class he loved,'I wish,'he said,'to see the poor men of England what the poor men of England were when I was born,and from endeavouring to accomplish this task,nothing but the want of means shall make me desist.'104He had a right to make that boast,and his ardour in the cause was as unimpeachable as honourable.
It explains why Cobbett has still a sympathetic side.He was a mass of rough human nature;no prig or bundle of abstract formula,like Paine and his Radical successors.Logic with him is not in excess,but in defect.
His doctrines are hopelessly inconsistent,except so far as they represent his stubborn prejudices.Any view will serve his purpose which can be made a weapon of offence in his multitudinous quarrels.Cobbett,like the Radicals of the time,was frightened by the gigantic progress of the debt.He had advocated war;but the peasant who was accustomed to reckon his income by pence,and had cried like a child when he lost the price of a red herring,was alarmed by the reckless piling up of millions of indebtedness.In 1806he calmly proposed to his patron Windham to put matters straight by repudiating the interest.'the nation must destroy the debt,or the debt will destroy the nation,'as he argued in the Register.105The proposal very likely caused the alienation of a respectable minister,though propounded with an amusing air of philosophical morality.Cobbett's alarm developed until it became to him a revelation of the mystery of iniquity.His Radical friends were denouncing placemen and jobbery,and Cobbett began to perceive what was at the bottom of the evil.The money raised to carry on the war served also to support a set of bloodsuckers,who were draining the national strength.Already,in 1804,he was lamenting a change due to Pitt's funding system.The old families,he said,were giving way to 'loan-jobbers,contractors,and nabobs';and the country people amazed to find that their new masters had been 'butchers,bakers,bottle-corkers,and old-clothesmen.'106Barings and Ricardos and their like were swallowing up the old country gentry wholesale;and in later years he reckons up,as he rides,the changes in his own neighbourhood.107His affection for the old country-gentleman might be superficial;but his lamentations over the degradation of the peasantry sprang from his heart.It was all,in his eyes,part of one process.
Paper money,he found out,was at the bottom of it all;for paper money was the outward and visible symbol of a gigantic system of corruption and jobbery.It represented the device by which the hard-earned wages of the labourer were being somehow conjured away into the pockets of Jews and stockjobbers.The classes which profited by this atrocious system formed what he called the 'thing'--the huge,indicate combination of knaves which was being denounced by the Radicals --though with a difference.
Cobbett could join the reformers in so far as,like them,he thought that the rotten boroughs were a vital part of the system.He meets a miserable labourer complaining of the 'hard times.'The harvest had been good,but its blessings were not for the labourer.That 'accursed hill,'says Cobbett,pointing to old Sarum,'is what has robbed you of your supper.'108The labourer represented the class whose blood was being sucked.
So far,then,as the Radicals were assailing the boroughmongers,Cobbett could be their cordial ally.
Two years'imprisonment for libel embittered his feelings.In the distress which succeeded the peace,Cobbett's voice was for a time loudest in the general hubbub.He reduced the price of his Register,and his 'two-penny dash'reached a circulation of 25,000or 30,000copies.He became a power in the land,and anticipated the immediate triumph of reform.The day was not yet.Sidmouth's measures of repression frightened Cobbett to America (March 1819),where he wrote his history of the 'last hundred days of English liberty.'He returned in a couple of years,damaged in reputation and broken in fortune;but only to carry on the war with indomitable energy,although with a recklessness and extravagance which alienated his allies and lowered his character.He tried to cover his errors by brags and bombast,which became ridiculous,and which are yet not without significance.
Cobbett came back from America with the relics of Paine.Paine,the object of his abuse,had become his idol,not because Cobbett cared much for any abstract political theories,or for religious dogmas.Paine's merit was that he had attacked paper money.
