Part III.
FROM QUITTING ENGLAND IN 1817 TO HIS DEATH IN 1835.
Settles on Long Island.—Professes at first great satisfaction.—Takes a farm,—Writes his Grammar.—Gets discontented.—His premises burnt.—He returns to England, and carries Paine’s bones with him.—The bones do not succeed.—Tries twice to be returned to Parliament.—Is not elected.—Becomes a butcher at Kensington.—Fails there and is a bankrupt.—His works from 1820 to 1826.—Extracts.—New prosecution.—Acquitted.—Comes at last into Parliament for Oldham.—Character as a speaker.—Dies.—General summing up.
I.
The epoch of Cobbett’s flight from England was decidedly the one most fatal to his character. So long as a man pays his bills, or sticks to his party, he has some one to speak in his favour; but a runaway from his party and his debts, whatever the circumstances that lead to his doing either, must give up the idea of leaving behind him any one disposed to say a word in his defence. Cobbett probably did give up this idea, and, having satisfied himself by declaring that the overthrow of the regular laws and constitution of England had rendered his person as a public writer insecure, and his talents unprofitable, in his native country, seemed disposed to a divorce from the old world, and to a reconciliation with the new. At all events, he viewed America with very different eyes from those with which he had formerly looked at it. The weather was the finest he had ever seen; the ground had no dirt; the air had no flies; the people were civil, not servile; there were none of the poor and wretched habitations which sicken the sight at the outskirts of cities and towns in England; the progress of wealth, ease, and enjoyment evinced by the regular increase of the size of the farmers’ buildings, spoke in praise of the system of government under which it had taken place; and, to crown all, four Yankee mowers weighed down eight English ones! During the greater part of the time that these encomiums were written, Cobbett was living at a farm he had taken on Hampstead Plains, Long Island, where he wrote his grammar, the only amusing grammar in the world, and of which, when it was sent to his son in England, 10,000 copies were sold in one month.
A year, however, after his arrival at Long Island, a fire broke out on his premises and destroyed them. The misfortune was not, perhaps, an untimely one.
Whatever Cobbett might have been able to do in the United States as a farmer, he did not seem to have a chance there of playing any part as a politician. He was not even taken up as a “lion,” for his sudden preference for Republican institutions created no sensation amongst men who were now all heart and soul Republicans. He was not a hero; and he could not, consistently with his present doctrines, attempt to become a martyr. He had, to be sure, the satisfaction of saying bitter things about the tyranny established in his native land; but these produced no effect in America, where abuse of monarchical government was thought quite natural, and he did not see the effect they produced at home. Moreover, they did not after all produce much effect even there. His periodical writings were like wine meant to be drunk on the spot, and lost a great deal of their flavour when sent across the wide waters of the ocean. They were, indeed, essentially written for the day, and for the passions and purposes of the day. Arriving after the cause which had produced them had ceased to excite the public mind, their sound and fury were like the smoke and smell of an explosion without its noise or its powers of destruction. Cobbett saw this clearly, though even to his own children he would never confess it.
II.
The condition of England, moreover, at this moment excited his attention, perhaps his hopes. A violent policy can never be a lasting one. The government was beginning to wear out the overstretched authority that had been confided to it and the community was beginning to feel that you should not make (to use the words of Mr. Burke) “the extreme remedies of the State its daily bread.” On the other hand, the general distress, which had created the discontent that these extreme remedies had been employed to suppress, was in no wise diminished. The sovereign and the administration were unpopular, the people generally ignorant and undisciplined, neither the one nor the other understanding the causes of the prevalent disaffection, nor having any idea as to how it should be dealt with.