[2] We get a glimpse of home over this incident:—“The youngest asked where Albany was. He ran to the map. And then the little pamphlet from Boston; they looked into it; they saw the same thing which they had, one or the other of them, written at my dictation only a few months before. Who would barter such pleasures for all the wealth and all the titles in the world?”
[3] That cruel urgency, want of space, forbids the insertion here of many a smart illustrative extract from Cobbett’s American writings. The following must suffice, being parts of a letter “to the people of Botley,” dated 10th November, 1818:—
“My old Neighbours,—Great as the distance between you and me is, I very often think of you, and especially when I buy salt, which our neighbour Warner used to sell us for 19s. a bushel, and which I buy here for 2s. 6d. This salt is made, you know, down somewhere by Hamble. This very salt, when brought here from England, has all the charges of freight, insurance, wharfage, steerage to pay. It pays, besides, one third of its value in duty to the American Government before it be landed here. Then, you will observe, there is the profit of the American salt merchant; and then that of the shopkeeper who sells me the salt. And, after all this, I buy that very Hampshire salt for 2s. 6d. a bushel, English measure. What a Government, then, must that of the borough-mongers be! The salt is a gift of God. It is thrown on the shore. And yet these tyrants will not suffer us to use it until we have paid them 15s. a bushel for liberty to use it.…
“You are compelled to pay the borough-mongers a heavy tax on your candles and soap. You dare not make candles and soap, though you have the fat and the ashes in abundance. If you attempt to do this, you are taken up and imprisoned; and if you resist, soldiers are brought to shoot you. This is freedom, is it? Now we, here, make our own candles and soap. Farmers sometimes sell soap and candles, but they never buy any. A labouring man, or a mechanic, buys a sheep now and then. Three or four days’ work will buy a labourer a sheep to weigh sixty pounds, with seven or eight pounds of loose fat. The meat keeps very well, in winter, for a long time. The wool makes stockings, and the loose fat is made into candles and soap. The year before I left Hampshire, a poor woman at Holly Hill had dipped some rushes in grease to use instead of candles. An exciseman found it out, went and ransacked her house, and told her that, if the rushes had had another dip, they would have been candles, and she must have gone to gaol! Why, my friends, if such a thing were told here, nobody would believe it.…
“I have had living with me an English labourer. He smokes tobacco, and he tells me that he can buy as much tobacco here for three cents, that is about three English half-pence, as he could buy in England for three shillings. The leather has no tax on it here; so that, though the shoemaker is paid a high price for his labour, the labouring man gets his shoes very cheap. In short, there is no excise here, no property tax, no assessed taxes. We have no such men as Chiddel and Billy Tovey to come and take our money from us; no window-peepers; no spies to keep a look out as to our carriages, and horses, and dogs.… We may wear hair-powder if we like, without paying for it, and a boy in our houses may whet our knives without our paying 2l. a year for it.”
“I have talked to several farmers here about the tithes in England, and they laugh. They sometimes almost make me angry, for they seem, at last, not to believe what I say when I tell them that the English farmer gives, and is compelled to give, the parson a tenth part of his whole crop, and of his fruit, and milk, and eggs, and calves, and lambs, and pigs, and wool, and honey. They cannot believe this. They treat it as a sort of romance.…
“To another of my neighbours … I was telling the story about the poor woman at Holly Hill, who had nearly dipped her rushes once too often. He is a very grave and religious man. He looked very seriously at me, and said that falsehood was falsehood, whether in jest or earnest.”
[4] There was a good deal of controversy concerning land-jobbing in America about this time. Mr. Morris Birkbeck, a prosperous farmer at Wanborough, in Surrey, left England with some highly coloured notions in his mind concerning the western territories of the United States, and produced two separate accounts, with the object of inducing British emigrants to follow him (“Notes on a Journey in America, from the Coast of Virginia to the Territory of Illinois,” and “Letters from Illinois”). Cobbett gave him a letter or two, under the impression that Birkbeck’s expectations were too fascinating. Mr. Birkbeck was unfortunately soon afterwards drowned in crossing a river. Mr. Henry Bradshaw Fearon, surgeon, went out under the auspices of some emigration committee. His was a somewhat “evil report,” and amongst other matters recorded a visit to Cobbett’s house in Long Island, which, he said, was mouldering to decay, that the fences were in ruins, and that the scene produced thoughts of melancholy (“Sketches of America: a Narrative of a Journey of 5000 Miles through the Eastern and Western States of America; with Remarks on Mr. Birkbeck’s ‘Notes’ and ‘Letters’”). The same candid pen which had endeavoured to check Birkbeck’s too great enthusiasm now had the duty to perform of chastising the author of these misrepresentations, and of Fearon’s general bad account of the Americans. Mr. Benjamin Flower also travelled westward, and sent home “Letters from the Illinois” (London, 1822). See, besides these, Faux’s “Memorable days in America” (London 1823).
[5] Mr. Paine has been variously described as a traitor, an apostate, a seducer, an infidel, a rogue, an outcast, and—“one of the most enlightened and benevolent men that ever lived.” The reconciling of these things must be left to his biographer; meanwhile, the following facts are all that are necessary to be at present noted:—Paine had been an exciseman, and discovered that he could write by the production of an eloquent pamphlet upon some grievance of the excise-officers. He had written poems, and enjoyed the friendship of Oliver Goldsmith. Being introduced to Dr. Franklin, he was induced to visit Philadelphia; and there he wrote a pamphlet under the title of “Common Sense,” which is generally asserted to have been a leading factor in producing the Declaration of Independence, being read and reprinted by hundreds of thousands. Honours came upon him; he was made Secretary to Congress for Foreign Affairs, and remained in America some dozen years. At the outbreak of the French Revolution, Paine was in London again, enjoying the friendship of Edmund Burke, whom, from the part the latter took concerning the American Revolution, Paine “naturally considered a friend to mankind.” Mr. Burke’s celebrated “Reflections on the Revolution in France” was, however, the means of sundering this friendship; and the tract was answered by Paine in “The Rights of Man,” a pamphlet which produced even more delight among the advanced liberals of the day than Burke’s had with the terrified aristocracy. The “answer” to Paine was his “Life,” “by Francis Oldys, A.M.” (one of the most horrible collections of abuse which even that venal day produced), written by George Chalmers, a Government clerk and pamphleteer, who, by the way, did much better work as an antiquarian and historical compiler. A second part of “The Rights of Man” followed this, and a Government prosecution succeeded that. A verdict of guilty, however, found the culprit a Member of the French National Convention; for no less than four constituencies had elected him, on his reputation alone. He sat for Calais; was near losing his head, for his vote on the side of humanity, when Louis XVI. was arraigned; wrote “The Age of Reason” in prison; eventually returned to America, and died (1809) in his seventy-third year, at his farm at New Rochelle, Long Island; which farm had been the gift of the nation about a quarter of a century previously.
[6] As, for example, under the head “Peterborough,” in the “Geographical Dictionary,” where Cobbett enters into a lament that to “the infamy” of Henry VIII., “and the shame of after-ages, there is no monument to record” the virtues and sufferings of Catherine of Arragon, who lies beneath the floor of the Cathedral; that the remains of Mary Queen of Scots had been taken thence to Westminster Abbey, while those of the virtuous queen were suffered to remain unhonoured, &c.