That some people were getting “staggered,” as Cobbett says, is by no means unlikely. He has been publicly called upon to “defend himself from the charge of not having joined the opponents of Sir Francis Burdett;” when, lo! it is discovered that an acknowledgment must be made, of at least some claim, on the part of the latter, to represent the Middlesex constituency, as against his opponent:—
“The former sentiments and expressions of Sir Francis Burdett were not, for the most part, so wrong in themselves as in the season of their application. Some of them, indeed, were such as no time or place would justify.… His language, and many of his acts, during the former election, as well as previous to it, were seditious to a degree bordering upon treason; they did, in my opinion, totally incapacitate him as a member of Parliament.… He chose to disgrace himself and his cause by an appeal to the worst passions of the worst part of the people. But if nothing of a seditious nature has appeared in the conduct of Sir Francis Burdett since that election, upon what principle will his opponents justify their resentment against him, whilst they are so ready to overlook the political sins of others?”
A few months earlier in this year, the ministerial part of the press had classed Burdett and Cobbett together as “a party endeavouring to create despondency.” This appears to have been the beginning of it; and Mr. Cobbett, on looking more dispassionately into Burdett’s claims as a politician, finds that the leading objects of both their minds are the same,—
“It will be recollected that, on the 2nd of July last, application was made to Parliament for a grant of 591,842l., wherewith to pay off the arrears of the Civil List; … Sir Francis Burdett took the liberty to say a few words to the thirty or forty persons who were about to grant this half-million of money, which was to be raised upon the people.… He objected to the ground upon which the minister had made this application, and could not see, he said, why the rise in prices and the consequent abridgment of every man’s comforts should be urged as a reason for augmenting the amount of the Civil List. He complained that there was a waste of the public money.… He did not declaim against taxes, but against their too great amount, and against the misapplication of them.…”
and protests that none but a contractor, a farmer-general, a paper-money maker, or a hired author, could find anything objectionable in the sentiments thus expressed. In short, Mr. Cobbett has discovered that the advocates of parliamentary reform are not, necessarily, a faction seeking to subvert the throne. He has had his grievance, some ten or a dozen years, against the “public-robbers;” but he has groped about, in pursuit of them, in crooked bye-ways: has even rubbed shoulders with them without knowing it: has now come in sight of the highway along which are running other pursuers, whose distant shouts have, till now, been unmeaning, because misunderstood.
He looks with abhorrence at the prospect of a revival “of those political animosities which were, during the last war and at the last peace, so fruitful in national calamity and disgrace, which destroyed all freedom of discussion and almost of intercourse; and which, while it sheltered all the follies and faults of the minister even from inquiry, exposed every word and act of every other man to misrepresentation and suspicion.”
Here, then, we have Mr. Cobbett fairly started upon his mission. Parliamentary opposition, hitherto, had meant a struggle for power and place, with the biggest share in the nation’s loaves and fishes; it would henceforth signify a determination to watch the grasping hand, to restrain the thirsty leech. And Mr. Cobbett will, at any cost, keep the nation on the alert concerning the proper disposition of its resources.
In the hope which Cobbett now indulged, of arresting, if possible, the enormous growth of the public debt, he began to advocate a union of the two opposition parties. We find him, then, about this time, obliged to defend himself from the charge of supporting Mr. Fox, whose “seditious ravings” it had once been “impossible to hear without indignation.” And the charge would naturally be indefensible on the part of a hireling. But the C. J. Fox that was now praised was not the C. J. Fox who once coquetted with Jacobins. In Cobbett’s eyes, Jacobinism was now dead and buried. The risk of anarchy had departed from British shores. The peace of Amiens had proved a failure; and the Whigs, who had opposed that treaty from one point of view, were beginning to coalesce with the Windhamites, who had opposed it from another. For some time past there had been hopes of a union of all the great men of the country, in a strong, “broad-bottom’d” administration, as the only means of restoring public confidence.
So, although Mr. Cobbett is ready to admit the claim of the heaven-born minister to a place among the great, he now declines any longer to support him, as hitherto. Not only that: he proceeds to instruct Mr. Pitt on the causes of his failure as a statesman. Rather cool, this, for the quondam ploughboy! But he must needs prove that Mr. Pitt has deserted his principles, in order to justify his own new position. As to the charge of versatility, he thinks that “inconsistency” means “the difference between profession and practice.” The best exposition of this “difference” is found in an article of the Register, toward the close of the year 1805:—
“If I praised Mr. Pitt, it was Mr. Pitt the ‘heaven-born’ minister, with regard to whose character I had participated in the adoption of those notions so prevalent amongst the ignorant crowd about twenty years ago. It was Mr. Pitt the corner-stone of the confederacy against republican France: Mr. Pitt who had openly and solemnly vowed never to make peace with France till the political balance of Europe should be completely restored, and till safety and tranquillity could be obtained for England; it was this Mr. Pitt that I praised, and not the Mr. Pitt who advised, who defended, and who extolled the peace of Amiens. The Mr. Pitt that I praised, as a financier, was the Mr. Pitt who, in the year 1799, declared that he would carry on the war for any length of time without the creation of new debt; and not the Mr. Pitt who, in less than two years afterwards, justified the peace as necessary for the husbanding of our resources, having, in the interim, created new debt to the amount of about seventy millions sterling. If I praised Mr. Pitt, as an upright public man, as a real patriot, it was the Mr. Pitt who began his career with professions of incorruptible purity, and who, in the warmth of his zeal, had proposed to reform the Parliament itself, rather than not cut off the means of corruption; and not the Mr. Pitt who procured to be passed the bill relating to the Nabob of Arcot’s debts (of which bill I had never yet heard); nor the Mr. Pitt who, notwithstanding the information of Mr. Raikes, suffered the practices of Lord Melville and Trotter to go on unchecked; no, no; not the Mr. Pitt who lent forty thousand pounds of the public money, without interest, to two members of Parliament—never making, or causing to be made, any record or minute of the transaction, and never communicating any knowledge of it even to the cabinet ministers.… The English Constitution that I extolled was that Constitution which, to use the words of Mr. Pitt himself (in his early days), carefully watches over the property of the people; that Constitution which effectually prevents any misapplication of the public money, or severely punishes those who may be guilty of such misapplication; and which, above all things, provides that the money raised upon the people, by the consent of their representatives, shall not in any degree, or under any name, be given to those representatives by the ministers of the crown, and especially in a secret manner. This Constitution I hope yet to see preserved in its purity; and were it not for that hope, neither hand nor pen would I move in its defence. But it will be so preserved, or we are the most base of mankind.”