Part 11

“Well, you’ll own that’s a very different thing. But, let’s see; will that find our wisest governor for us—letting all the foolishest men in the nation have a say as to who he is to be?”

“Come now, Hardy, I’ve heard you say that you are for manhood suffrage.”

“That’s another question; you let in another idea there. At present we are considering whether the _vox populi_ is the best test for finding your best man. I’m afraid all history is against you.”

“That’s a good joke. Now, there I defy you, Hardy.”

“Begin at the beginning, then, and let us see.”

“I suppose you’ll say, then, that the Egyptian and Babylonian empires were better than the little Jewish republic.”

“Republic! well, let that pass. But I never heard that the Jews elected Moses, or any of the judges.”

“Well, never mind the Jews; they’re an exceptional case: you can’t argue from them.”

“I don’t admit that. I believe just the contrary. But go on.”

“Well, then, what do you say to the glorious Greek republics, with Athens at the head of them?”

“I say that no nation ever treated their best men so badly. I see I must put on a lecture in Aristophanes for your special benefit. Vain, irritable, shallow, suspicious old Demus, with his two oboli in his cheek, and doubting only between Cleon and the sausage-seller, which he shall choose for his wisest man—not to govern, but to serve his whims and caprices. You must call another witness, I think.”

“But that’s a caricature.”

“Take the picture, then, out of Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon, how you will—you won’t mend the matter much. You shouldn’t go so fast, Brown; you won’t mind my saying so, I know. You don’t get clear in your own mind before you pitch into every one who comes across you, and so do your own side (which I admit is mostly the right one) more harm than good.”

Tom couldn’t stand being put down so summarily, and fought over the ground from one country to another, from Rome to the United States, with all the arguments he could muster, but with little success. That unfortunate first admission of his, he felt it throughout, like a mill-stone round his neck, and could not help admitting to himself, when he left, that there was a good deal in Hardy’s concluding remark: “You’ll find it rather a tough business to get your ‘universal democracy,’ and ‘government by the wisest,’ to pull together in one coach.”

Notwithstanding all such occasional reverses and cold baths, however, Tom went on strengthening himself in his new opinions, and maintaining them with all the zeal of a convert. The shelves of his bookcase, and the walls of his room, soon began to show signs of the change which was taking place in his ways of looking at men and things. Hitherto a framed engraving of George III. had hung over his mantel-piece; but early in this, his third year, the frame had disappeared for a few days, and when it reappeared, the solemn face of John Milton looked out from it, while the honest monarch had retired into a portfolio. A facsimile of Magna Charta soon displaced a large colored print of “A Day with the Pycheley;” and soon afterwards the death-warrant of Charles I., with its grim and resolute rows of signatures and seals, appeared on the wall in a place of honor, in the neighborhood of Milton.

XCII.

“I can’t for the life of me fancy, I confess,” wrote Tom, “what you think will come of speculating about necessity and free will. I only know that I can hold out my hand before me, and can move it to the right or left, despite of all powers in heaven or earth. As I sit here writing to you I can let into my heart, and give the reins to, all sorts of devils’ passions, or to the Spirit of God. Well, that’s enough for me. I _know_ it of myself, and I believe you know it of yourself, and everybody knows it of themselves or himself; and why you can’t be satisfied with that, passes my comprehension. As if one hasn’t got puzzles enough, and bothers enough, under one’s nose, without going afield after a lot of metaphysical quibbles. No, I’m wrong—not going afield—anything one has to go afield for is all right. What a fellow meets outside himself he isn’t responsible for, and must do the best he can with. But to go on forever looking inside of one’s self, and groping about amongst one’s own sensations, and ideas, and whimsies of one kind and another, I can’t conceive a poorer line of business than that. Don’t you get into it now, that’s a dear boy.

“Very likely you’ll tell me you can’t help it; that every one has his own difficulties, and must fight them out, and that mine are one sort, and yours another. Well, perhaps you may be right. I hope I’m getting to know that my plummet isn’t to measure all the world. But it does seem a pity that men shouldn’t be thinking about how to cure some of the wrongs which poor dear old England is pretty near dying of, instead of taking the edge off their brains, and spending all their steam in speculating about all kinds of things, which wouldn’t make any poor man in the world—or rich one either, for that matter—a bit better off, if they were all found out, and settled to-morrow.”

XCIII.

William Cobbett was born in 1762 at Farnham, the third son of a small farmer, honest, industrious, and frugal, from whom, as his famous son writes, “if he derived no honor, he derived no shame,” and who used to boast that he had four boys, the eldest but fifteen, who did as much work as any three men in the parish of Farnham. “When I first trudged afield,” William writes, “with my wooden bottle and satchel slung over my shoulder, I was hardly able to climb the gates and stiles.” From driving the small birds from the turnip-seed and rooks from the peas, he rose to weeding wheat, hoeing peas, and so up to driving the plough for 2_d._ a day, which paid for the evening school where he learned to read and write, getting in this rough way the rudiments of an education over which he rejoices as he contrasts it triumphantly with that of the “frivolous idiots that are turned out from Winchester and Westminster Schools, or from those dens of dunces called Colleges and Universities,” as having given him the ability to become “one of the greatest terrors to one of the greatest and most powerful bodies of knaves and fools that were ever permitted to afflict this or any other country.”

At eleven he was employed in clipping the boxedgings in the gardens of Farnham Castle, and, hearing from one of the gardeners of the glories of Kew, he started for that place with 1_s._ 1½_d._ in his pocket, 3_d._ of which sum he spent in buying “Swift’s Tale of a Tub.” The book produced a “birth of intellect” in the little rustic. He carried it with him wherever he went, and at twenty-four lost it in a box which fell overboard in the Bay of Fundy, a “loss which gave me greater pain than I have ever felt at losing thousands of pounds.” He returned home, and continued to work for his father till 1782, attending fairs and hearing Washington’s health proposed by his father at farmers’ ordinaries. In that year he went on a visit to Portsmouth, saw the sea for the first time, and was with difficulty hindered from taking service at once on board a man-of-war. He returned home “spoilt for a farmer,” and next year started for London. He served in a solicitor’s office in Gray’s Inn for eight months (where he worked hard at grammar), then enlisted in the 54th regiment, and after a few weeks’ drill at Chatham embarked for Nova Scotia, where the corps were serving. Here his temperate habits, strict performance of duty, and masterly ability and intelligence, raised him in little more than a year to the post of sergeant-major over the heads of fifty comrades his seniors in service. His few spare hours were spent in hard study, especially in acquiring a thorough mastery of grammar. He had bought Lowth’s Grammar, which he wrote out two or three times, got it by heart, and imposed on himself the task of saying it over to himself every time he was posted sentinel. When he had thoroughly mastered it, and could write with ease and correctness, he turned to logic, rhetoric, geometry, French, to Vauban’s fortification, and books on military exercise and evolutions. In this way, by the year 1791, when the 54th was recalled, he had become the most trusted man in the regiment. The colonel used him as a sort of second adjutant; all the paymaster’s accounts were prepared by him; he coached the officers, and used to make out cards with the words of command for many of them, who, on parade, as he scornfully writes, “were commanding me to move my hands and feet in words I had taught them, and were in everything except mere authority my inferiors, and ought to have been commanded by me.” Notwithstanding the masterfulness already showing itself, Cobbett was a strictly obedient soldier, and left the army with the offer of a commission, and the highest character for ability and zeal.

No sooner, however, was his discharge accomplished, than he set himself to work to expose and bring to justice several of the officers of his regiment, who had systematically mulcted the soldiers in their companies of their wretched pay. His thorough knowledge of the regimental accounts made him a formidable accuser; and, after looking into the matter, the then Judge-Advocate-General agreed to prosecute, and a court-martial was summoned at Woolwich for the purpose in 1792. But Cobbett did not appear. He found that it would be necessary to call his clerks, still serving in the regiment, and the consequences to them in those days were likely to be so serious, that he preferred to abandon his attempt. Accordingly, he did not appear, and the fact was bitterly used against him in later days by his political opponents. The whole story is worth reading, and is very fairly given by Mr. Smith. He had now made a happy marriage with the girl to whom he had entrusted all his savings years before, and started with her to Paris; but, hearing on the way of the king’s dethronement, and the Bastile riots, he turned aside and embarked for America.

He arrived in Philadelphia in October 1792, enthusiastic for the land of liberty, and an ardent student of Paine’s works, and set to work to gain his living by teaching English to the French emigrants there, and by such literary work as he could get. In both he was very successful, but soon found himself in fierce antagonism with the American press, and, after publishing several pamphlets, “A Kick for a Bite,” “A Bone to Gnaw for the Democrats,” &c., established his first famous periodical, “Peter Porcupine,” which soon gained him the reputation in England as well as America of a staunch and able loyalist, and severe critic of Republican institutions. The only serious mistake in his American career was his attack on Dr. Priestly, then also an emigrant in Philadelphia. The States had become an undesirable place of residence for him before 1798, when an intimation reached him through the British Embassy that the English Government were sensible of the obligations they owed him, and were prepared to advance his interests. These overtures he steadily refused; but, finding a Royalist’s life was becoming too hot, and having been beaten in a libel suit, which nearly ruined him (though his expenses were nominally defrayed by the subscriptions of his American admirers), he closed the brilliant career of “Peter Porcupine’s Gazette,” and returned to England, having at last, to use his own phrase, “got the better of all diffidence in my own capacity.”

He reached home in 1800, and found himself at once courted and famous. He was entertained by Ministers of State and publishers, but after looking round him in his own sturdy fashion, and finding the condition of the political and literary world by no means to his mind, while that of the great body of the people was becoming worse every day, he resisted all temptations and started on the career which he followed faithfully till his death. In 1802 appeared the first number of “Cobbett’s Political Register,” which (with the break of two months in 1817, when he fled from the new Gagging Act to America) continued to appear weekly till June 1835, and remains a wonderful witness to the strength and the weaknesses of the Sussex ploughboy. During those long years, and all the fierce controversies which marked them, he was grandly faithful, according to his lights, to the cause of the poor:—“I for my part should not be at all surprised,” he wrote in 1806, “if some one were to propose selling the poor, or mortgaging them to the fund-holders. Ah! you may wince; you may cry Jacobin or leveller as long as you please. I wish to see the poor men of England what the poor men of England were when I was born; and from endeavoring to accomplish this wish nothing but the want of means shall make me desist.” And loyally he maintained the fight against sinecures, place-hunting, and corruption of all kinds until his death, full of years, the member for Oldham, and the popular leader of the widest influence among the Liberal party of the first Reform period. For the incidents of the long struggle—how the government press turned savagely on the man whom they had hailed on his return from America as one “whom no corruption can seduce nor any personal danger intimidate from the performance of his duty;” how Attorney-Generals watched him and prosecuted; how he insisted on conducting his own causes, and so spent two years in jail, and was mulcted again and again in heavy damages; how he fought through it all, and tended his farm and fruit-trees, and wrote his “Rural Rides” and “Cottage Economy,” and was a tender and loving man in his own home, and retained the warm regard of such men as Wyndham and Lord Radnor, while he was the best hated and abused man in England—we must refer all (and we hope there are many) who care to know about them to the second volume of Edward Smith’s life of Cobbett.

There are few lives that we know of better worth careful study in these times. We have no space here to do more than quote the best estimate of the man’s work which has ever come from one of those classes who for thirty-five years looked on him as their most dangerous enemy:—

“I know him well, on every side Walled round with wilful prejudice; A self-taught peasant rough in speech, Self-taught, and confident to teach, In blame not overwise.

What matter, if an honest thought Sometimes a homely phrase require? Let those who fear the bracing air Look for a milder sky elsewhere, Or stay beside the fire.

There are worse things in this bad world Than bitter speech and bearing free— I hail thee, genuine English born— Not yet the lineage is outworn That owns a man like thee.”

XCIV.

The state of Europe thirty years ago was far more dead and hopeless than now. There were no wars, certainly, and no expectations of wars. But there was a dull, beaten-down, pent-up feeling abroad, as if the lid were screwed down on the nations, and the thing which had been, however cruel and heavy and mean, was that which was to remain to the end. England was better off than her neighbors, but yet in bad case. In the south and west particularly, several causes had combined to spread a very bitter feeling abroad amongst the agricultural poor. First among these stood the new poor law, the provisions of which were rigorously carried out in most districts. The poor had as yet felt the harshness only of the new system. Then the land was in many places in the hands of men on their last legs, the old sporting farmers, who had begun business as young men while the great war was going on, had made money hand over hand for a few years out of the war prices, and had tried to go on living with grayhounds and yeomanry uniforms—“horse to ride and weapon to wear”—through the hard years which had followed. These were bad masters in every way, unthrifty, profligate, needy, and narrow-minded. The younger men who were supplanting them were introducing machinery, threshing machines and winnowing machines, to take the little bread which a poor man was still able to earn out of the mouths of his wife and children—so at least the poor thought and muttered to one another; and the mutterings broke out every now and then in the long nights of the winter months in blazing ricks and broken machines. Game preserving was on the increase. Australia and America had not yet become familiar words in every English village, and the labor market was everywhere overstocked; and last, but not least, the corn laws were still in force, and the bitter and exasperating strife in which they went out was at its height. And while Swing and his myrmidons were abroad in the counties, and could scarcely be kept down by yeomanry and poor-law guardians, the great towns were in almost worse case. Here too emigration had not yet set in to thin the labor market; wages were falling, and prices rising; the corn-law struggle was better understood and far keener than in the country; and Chartism was gaining force every day, and rising into a huge threatening giant, waiting to put forth his strength, and eager for the occasion which seemed at hand.

You generation of young men, who were too young then to be troubled with such matters, and have grown into manhood since, you little know—may you never know!—what it is to be living the citizens of a divided and distracted nation. For the time that danger is past. In a happy hour, and so far as man can judge, in time, and only just in time, came the repeal of the corn laws, and the great cause of strife and the sense of injustice passed away out of men’s minds. The nation was roused by the Irish famine, and the fearful distress in other parts of the country, to begin looking steadily and seriously at some of the sores which were festering in its body, and undermining health and life. And so the tide had turned, and England had already passed the critical point, when 1848 came upon Christendom, and the whole of Europe leapt up into a wild blaze of revolution.

Is any one still inclined to make light of the danger that threatened England in that year, to sneer at the 10th of April, and the monster petition, and the monster meetings on Kennington and other commons? Well, if there be such persons amongst my readers, I can only say that they can have known nothing of what was going on around them and below them, at that time, and I earnestly hope that their vision has become clearer since then, and that they are not looking with the same eyes that see nothing, at the signs of to-day. For that there are questions still to be solved by us in England, in this current half-century, quite as likely to tear the nation in pieces as the corn laws, no man with half an eye in his head can doubt. They may seem little clouds like a man’s hand on the horizon just now, but they will darken the whole heaven before long, unless we can find wisdom enough amongst us to take the little clouds in hand in time, and make them descend in soft rain.

XCV.

The years 1848-9 had been years of revolution, and, as always happens at such times, the minds of men had been greatly stirred on many questions, and especially on the problem of the social condition of the great mass of the poor in all European countries. In Paris, the revolution had been the signal for a great effort on the part of the workmen; and some remarkable experiments had been made, both by the Provisional Government of 1848 and by certain employers of labor, and bodies of skilled mechanics, with a view to place the conditions of labor upon a more equitable and satisfactory footing, or, to use the common phrase of the day, to reconcile the interests of capital and labor. The government experiment of “national workshops” had failed disastrously, but a number of the private associations were brilliantly successful. The history of some of these associations—of the sacrifices which had been joyfully made by the associates in order to collect the small funds necessary to start them—of the ability and industry with which they were conducted, and of their marvellous effect on the habits of all those engaged in the work, had deeply interested many persons in England. It was resolved to try an experiment of the same kind in England, but the conditions were very different. The seed there had already taken root amongst the industrial classes, and the movement had come from them. In England the workpeople, as a rule, had no belief in association, except for defensive purposes. It was chiefly amongst young professional men that the idea was working, and it was necessary to preach it to those whom it most concerned. Accordingly a society was formed, chiefly of young barristers, under the presidency of the late Mr. Maurice, who was then Chaplain of Lincoln’s Inn, for the purpose of establishing associations similar to those in Paris. It was called the Society for Promoting Working Men’s Associations, and I happened to be one of the original members, and on the Council. We were all full of enthusiasm and hope in our work, and of propagandist zeal: anxious to bring in all the recruits we could. I cannot even now think of my own state of mind at the time without wonder and amusement. I certainly thought (and for that matter have never altered my opinion to this day) that here we had found the solution of the great labor question; but I was also convinced that we had nothing to do but just to announce it, and found an association or two, in order to convert all England, and usher in the millennium at once, so plain did the whole thing seem to me. I will not undertake to answer for the rest of the Council, but I doubt whether I was at all more sanguine than the majority. Consequently we went at it with a will: held meetings at six o’clock in the morning (so as not to interfere with our regular work) for settling the rules of our central society, and its off-shoots, and late in the evening, for gathering tailors, shoemakers, and other handicraftsmen, whom we might set to work; started a small publishing office, presided over by a diminutive one-eyed costermonger, a rough-and-ready speaker and poet (who had been in prison as a Chartist leader), from which we issued tracts and pamphlets, and ultimately a small newspaper; and, as the essential condition of any satisfactory progress, commenced a vigorous agitation for such an amendment in the law as would enable our infant associations to carry on their business in safety, and without hindrance. We very soon had our hands full. Our denunciations of unlimited competition brought on us attacks in newspapers and magazines, which we answered, nothing loth. Our opponents called us Utopians and Socialists, and we retorted that at any rate we were Christians; that our trade principles were on all-fours with Christianity, while theirs were utterly opposed to it. So we got, or adopted, the name of Christian Socialists, and gave it to our tracts, and our paper. We were ready to fight our battle wherever we found an opening, and got support from the most unexpected quarters. I remember myself being asked to meet Archbishop Whately, and several eminent political economists, and explain what we were about. After a couple of hours of hard discussion, in which I have no doubt I talked much nonsense, I retired, beaten, but quite unconvinced. Next day, the late Lord Ashburton, who had been present, came to my chambers and gave me a cheque for £50 to help our experiment; and a few days later I found another nobleman, sitting on the counter of our shoemakers’ association, arguing with the manager, and giving an order for boots.