The new elections are coming on in April, and Mr. Cobbett is determined not to interfere, unless positively compelled. As soon as the election is over, he will “set about writing sober essays of exposure: quote from official documents, state the bare facts, and lament, as I most sincerely do, the inevitable consequences.” He foresees the inutility of Mr. Paull contesting Westminster again, and the event proves that he is right. But he continues his unasked-for advice to the electors. And he does keep to facts, facts which all who have eyes may see. Seats in Parliament are being openly advertised for sale in the daily papers,[8]—in Whig papers; and this villainous scribbler presses for an explanation, particularly from that party which is always flaunting the flag of 1688, and which yet rails at him, and abuses him, and calls him nicknames, for trying to hold them to their principles.
As for his own writings, conscious though he be of their power and clearness, and of the admiration excited by them in the minds of all who are not the recipients of his lashing, he will be more than ever guarded in expression:—
“… I see the fangs of the law open to grasp me, and I feel the necessity of leaving no hold for them, and even no ground for silly cavillers, upon the score of coarseness or violence. I am armed with undeniable facts, and my reasoning (at least in my own opinion of it) shall be as undeniably conclusive. The times are auspicious to us, and we have nothing to fear but the effects of ungovernable indignation.”
“… As to the ‘large pamphlet that is coming out against us all,’ the larger it is, the better it will be for the author; for the fewer people will read it, and the fewer the readers, the fewer those who will despise him. That any creature upon two legs should be so foolish!”
In the early part of this history, allusion was made to the growing impoverishment of the labouring classes. A quarter of a century was now elapsed, since the Hereditary Pauper started into being; and his race was now numbered by the million. The parishes were raising six millions sterling, for purposes of relief; and the recipients were going steadily down, down, down. They were becoming practically enslaved. The average rural labourer was now feeding upon bread, vegetables, and water. His children were uneducated; his wife was in rags; his dwelling was either a ruin or a hovel.
And, it is very curious matter for reflection, to note how ready the comfortable classes were to acquiesce in tolerating this state of things. Schemes of amelioration were broached by a few, but they were generally based upon a total ignorance of first-cause. Your social tinker,—amiable, bland, and very serious,—caught a glimpse of the poor wretches so far beneath him; and, straightway recollecting the words of Scripture, that the poor should “never cease out of the land,” opened his purse-strings, exhorted his friends to do the like,—and left matters worse than before.[9] Your local authority, and your parson-pluralist, deeply impressed with the need of preserving the “indispensable gradations of society,” in their full integrity, refused a cow to the cottager, lest he should be thereby rendered too independent! absolutely ignorant of the fact, that forty or fifty years previously, the rural labourer not only had his cow,—but his pigs, his geese, his beer, and his bacon, and a tolerable share of the comforts of life: his outward condition, in point of fact, being scarcely inferior to that of the farmers, and even the clergy, around him.
Now, in this year of grace 1807, there was no man living who was a better authority on this topic, than the hero of these pages. And, what is more, there was no living being, who had a tenderer sympathy with the wants and the wailings of the meanest fellow-creature; be it a skylark, or be it a ploughboy.
And the tinkers, and the tailors, solemnly going to work with new patches, the only end of which must be the further enslavement and degradation of the poor; and the end of which could not possibly be the healing of their stomachs, or the mending of their breeches and their gowns; he now bursts out,—
“I, for my part, should not be at all surprised, if some one were to propose the selling of the poor, or the mortgaging of them to the fund-holders. Ay! you may wince; you may cry Jacobin and 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 endeavouring to accomplish this wish nothing but the want of means shall make me desist.”