14 JUNE 1935, Page 9

WILLIAM COBBETT*

By J. L. HAMMOND TO his own generation Cobbett was chiefly known as a reformer, and reformers were chiefly known as disagreeable people. Bentham said of them that they were necessary, but that they got so unsavoury from their trade that it was absolutely necessary to send them to the rear when the practical combat came on. If this was what Bentham thought of men like Hunt and Cobbett, it is not surprising that politicians who were less anxious than he for reform thought still worse of them. The truth was that nobody would have dreamt of attacking the old corrupt world of privilege and monopoly in the days when Sidmouth and Castlereagh were using unjust laws and unscrupulous spies to oppress all working-class move- ment, unless he had possessed remarkable self-confidence. Self-confidence was the common gift of all the popular reformers, Cobbett, Hunt, Carlile, Burdett and the rest. But self-confidence, so necessary for their task, is not a prepossessing quality, and the self-confidence of men who know that they owe very little to the society in which they have been brought up, and almost everything to their own exertions, is apt to produce a temper that is dogmatic, intolerant and unjust.

For such men lose that habit of distinguishing between classes and persons, between institutions and men, which is so important a part of the technique of politicians. A man who wanted reform in the dark days of Peterloo was quite right to use every means in his power to dis- credit the ruling system. Just as O'Connell, anxious to give the Irish peasant self-respect, set himself to shake the prestige of the landlord and the judge in Ireland, so Cobbett and Hunt, anxious to give the English poor self- respect, threw themselves on the upper-class world, using all their resources of invective and ridicule to bring odium on Parliament, the Church, the Universities, and all the institutions in which the strength of that world was collected and symbolized. But lacking the training in self-control that the ordinary politician had received they treated each other, when they differed, in the same spirit. When Cobbett quarrelled with Burdett he attacked him as if he had been an enclosing landlord ; when he quarrelled with Hunt he attacked him as if he had been *Died 'June 18th, 1835. a Methodist preacher. Thus the world resounded with the quarrels of men who did not care how ridiculous they made themselves if only they could wound each other. Their quarrels were in one sense the mark of their passionate sincerity, but the ordinary man drew less flattering con- clusions. Instead of taking Cobbett's view of Cobbett and Hunt's view of Hunt, he was apt at such times to take Cobbett's view of Hunt and Hunt's view of Cobbett.

Cobbett was the most striking product of this age, the most remarkable instance of what The Times well called " unpatronized and self-generated power." He had all its vices and all its strength. He was widely known as the contentious man, and his egotism and vanity made him an intolerable colleague. But he was undoubtedly the greatest individual force of his time. " Take this self-taught peasant for all in all," said The Times when he died, " he was perhaps in some respects a more extra- ordinary Englishman than any other of his time." His political power suffered, as Mr. Cole pointed out in his brilliant biography, a curious fate. He was, as The Times said, essentially a peasant. The men for whose wrongs his heart bled were the small farmers and labourers whose decline into hopeless poverty and degradation was the tragedy of his lifetime. But the men whom he influenced chiefly were the factory workers. " The last great tribune of the agrarians was, by force of circumstances, also the first great tribune of the industrial proletariate." In 1795 the Lancashire workers were for the Church and King; in 1830 the Lancashire mills were full of eager excitement when the London coaches arrived bringing the new number of Cobbett's Political Register.

By a curious irony too Cobbett helped to establish the power of the middle classes and to bring about a series of measures that he hated. For he, more than anybody else, persuaded the working classes of the north to support the Reform Bill of 1832, being on this point in sharp conflict with Hunt, and he lived to see as a con- sequence of that measure the Poor Law of 1834. It is safe to say that no Act of Parliament passed by the old unreformed House of Commons was more odious to Cobbett than the first great Act passed by the House of Commons of which he had cherished such radiant dreams. For several years he had concentrated his strength on pressing the demand for the Reform of Parliament and the first gift of his reformed Parliament to the poor was this bitter East Wind. Almost his last utterance was an offer to support Peel, whose expulsion ft.( m the Privy Codncil he had once demanded, the leader of the party that had opposed his pet panacea, if only he would promise to repeal that hated Act.

But if Cobbett's political influence was chiefly active in making the working classes in the towns self-conscious, it was because he was a peasant that his fame has out- lived that of all the other reformers of his time. As a journalist with his unrivalled gift for clever and sparkling analysis and ridicule he became what Hazlitt called him, a fourth estate in himself. But those gifts alone do not give a man lasting renown. Cobbett was the only man of power and mark in his world who saw what was happening to the England of his boyhood. Most men of his type and class used their gifts to climb out of that ruin by the ladder of the Industrial Revolution. He used his to describe the England that was vanishing and to declaim against the misery and injustice that seemed to others the price of progress. . To most of his contem-. poraries he seemed a violent, headstrong inconsistent man, whose tools . were " loose tongued vituperation, the reckless use of second-hand facts, the appeals to every form of unthinking prejudice." But behind his career there was a unity.

He differed from most reformers because he started not from the rights other men had conceived, but from the wrongs he saw around him. " I wish to see the poor men of England what the poor men of England were when I was a boy." He was not by nature an iconoclast but as he watched the suffering of that class, he attacked one after another, the usurpations and monopolies that had enriched one class and weakened others until, as he put it to Althorp, half of the community was living on the labour and half-starvation of the other. "For whom were the Universities founded ? What was the origin of tithes ? By what title does your aristocracy own its great estates and how is it observing its obligations ? " As he asked these questions, he rewrote English history for the poor. And it was because he had this sweeping sense of wrong and injustice in his mind that he wrote with such indignant power. Behind the Rural Rides there, was as much political purpose, as strong a feeling for human life, as there was behind the Georgics. He failed to rescue the poor, or to arrest the savage hand that punished and oppressed the unhappy men who in 1830 were driven to violence by despair. But his picture of England lives and will live just because his love for her hedges and her lanes was part of his love for her common people and his passionate sorrow for their calamities.