Don’t let reformers of any sort think that they are going really to lay hold of the working boys and young men of England by any educational grapnel whatever, which hasn’t some bona fide equivalent for the games of the old country “veast” in it; something to put in the place of the back-swording and wrestling and racing; something to try the muscles of men’s bodies, and the endurance of their hearts, and to make them rejoice in their strength. In all the new-fangled comprehensive plans which I see, this is all left out: and the consequence is, that your great Mechanics’ Institutes end in intellectual priggism, and your Christian Young Men’s Societies in religious Pharisaism.

Well, well, we must bide our time. Life isn’t all beer and skittles – but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman’s education. If I could only drive this into the heads of you rising Parliamentary Lords, and young swells who “have your ways made for you,” as the saying is – you, who frequent palaver houses and West-end Clubs, waiting always to strap yourselves on to the back of poor dear old John Bull, as soon as the present used-up lot (your fathers and uncles), who sit there on the great Parliamentary-majorities’ pack-saddle, and make believe they’re grinding him with their red-tape bridle, tumble, or have to be lifted off!

I don’t think much of you yet – I wish I could; though you do go talking and lecturing up and down the country to crowded audiences, and are busy with all sorts of philanthropic intellectualism, and circulating libraries and museums, and heaven only knows what besides, and try to make us think, through newspaper reports, that you are, even as we, of the working classes. But, bless your hearts, we ain’t so “green,” though lots of us of all sorts toady you enough certainly, and try to make you think so.

I’ll tell you what to do now: instead of all this trumpeting and fuss, which is only the old Parliamentary-majority dodge over again – just you go, each of you (you’ve plenty of time for it, if you’ll only give up the other line), and quietly make three or four friends, real friends, among us. You’ll find a little trouble in getting at the right sort, because such birds don’t come lightly to your lure – but found they may be. Take, say, two out of the professions, lawyer, parson, doctor – which you will; one out of trade, and three or four out of the working classes, tailors, engineers, carpenters, engravers – there’s plenty of choice. Let them be men of your own ages, mind, and ask them to your homes; introduce them to your wives and sisters, and get introduced to theirs; give them good dinners, and talk to them about what is really at the bottom of your hearts, and box, and run, and row with them, when you have a chance. Do all this honestly as man to man, and by the time you come to ride old John, you’ll be able to do something more than sit on his back, and may feel his mouth with some stronger bridle than a red-tape one.

Ah, if you only would! But you have got too far out of the right rut, I fear. Too much over-civilization, and the deceitfulness of riches. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. More’s the pity. I never came across but two of you who could value a man wholly and solely for what was in him; who thought themselves verily and indeed of the same flesh and blood as John Jones, the attorney’s clerk, and Bill Smith, the costermonger, and could act as if they thought so.

XCI

The change in Tom’s opinions and objects of interest brought him now into more intimate relations with a set of whom he had as yet seen little. For want of a better name, we may call them “the party of progress.” At their parties, instead of practical jokes, and boisterous mirth, and talk of boats, and bats, and guns, and horses, the highest and deepest questions of morals, and politics, and metaphysics, were discussed, and discussed with a freshness and enthusiasm which is apt to wear off when doing has to take the place of talking, but has a strange charm of its own while it lasts, and is looked back to with loving regret by those for whom it is no longer a possibility.

With this set Tom soon fraternized, and drank in many new ideas, and took to himself also many new crotchets besides those with which he was really weighted. Almost all his new acquaintances were Liberal in politics, but a few only were ready to go all lengths with him. They were all Union men, and Tom, of course, followed the fashion, and soon propounded theories in that institution which gained him the name of Chartist Brown.

There was a strong mixture of self-conceit in it all. He had a kind of idea that he had discovered something which it was creditable to have discovered, and that it was a very fine thing to have all these feelings for, and sympathies with, “the masses,” and to believe in democracy, and “glorious humanity,” and “a good time coming,” and I know not what other big matters. And, although it startled and pained him at first to hear himself called ugly names, which he had hated and despised from his youth up, and to know that many of his old acquaintances looked upon him, not simply as a madman, but as a madman with snobbish proclivities; yet, when the first plunge was over, there was a good deal on the other hand which tickled his vanity, and was far from being unpleasant.

To do him justice, however, the disagreeables were such that, had there not been some genuine belief at the bottom, he would certainly have been headed back very speedily into the fold of political and social orthodoxy. As it was, amidst the cloud of sophisms, and platitudes, and big one-sided ideas half-mastered, which filled his thoughts and overflowed in his talk, there was growing in him and taking firmer hold on him daily a true and broad sympathy for men as men, and especially for poor men as poor men, and a righteous and burning hatred against all laws, customs, or notions, which, according to his light, either were or seemed to be setting aside, or putting anything else in the place of, or above the man. It was with him the natural outgrowth of the child’s and boy’s training (though his father would have been much astonished to be told so), and the instincts of those early days were now getting rapidly set into habits and faiths, and becoming a part of himself.

In this stage of his life, as in so many former ones, Tom got great help from his intercourse with Hardy, now the rising tutor of the college. Hardy was travelling much the same road himself as our hero, but was somewhat further on, and had come into it from a different country, and through quite other obstacles. Their early lives had been so different; and, both by nature and from long and severe self-restraint and discipline, Hardy was much the less impetuous and demonstrative of the two. He did not rush out, therefore (as Tom was too much inclined to do), the moment he had seized hold of the end of a new idea which he felt to be good for him and what he wanted, and brandish it in the face of all comers, and think himself a traitor to the truth if he wasn’t trying to make everybody he met with eat it. Hardy, on the contrary, would test his new idea, and turn it over, and prove it as far as he could, and try to get hold of the whole of it, and ruthlessly strip off any tinsel or rose-pink sentiment with which it might happen to be mixed up.

Often and often did Tom suffer under this severe method, and rebel against it, and accuse his friend, both to his face and in his own secret thought, of coldness, and want of faith, and all manner of other sins of omission and commission. In the end, however, he generally came round, with more or less of rebellion, according to the severity of the treatment, and acknowledged that, when Hardy brought him down from riding the high horse, it was not without good reason, and that the dust in which he was rolled was always most wholesome dust.

For instance, there was no phrase more frequently in the mouths of the party of progress than “the good cause.” It was a fine big-sounding phrase, which could be used with great effect in perorations of speeches at the Union, and was sufficiently indefinite to be easily defended from ordinary attacks, while it saved him who used it the trouble of ascertaining accurately for himself or settling for his hearers what it really did mean. But, however satisfactory it might be before promiscuous audiences, and so long as vehement assertion or declaration was all that was required to uphold it, this same “good cause” was liable to come to much grief when it had to get itself defined. Hardy was particularly given to persecution on this subject, when he could get Tom, and, perhaps, one or two others, in a quiet room by themselves. While professing the utmost sympathy for “the good cause,” and a hope as strong as theirs that all its enemies might find themselves suspended to lamp-posts as soon as possible, he would pursue it into corners from which escape was most difficult, asking it and its supporters what it exactly was, and driving them from one cloud-land to another, and from “the good cause” to the “people’s cause,” “the cause of labor,” and other like troublesome definitions, until the great idea seemed to have no shape or existence any longer even in their own brains.

But Hardy’s persecution, provoking as it was for the time, never went to the undermining of any real conviction in the minds of his juniors, or the shaking of anything which did not need shaking, but only helped them to clear their ideas and brains as to what they were talking and thinking about, and gave them glimpses – soon clouded over again, but most useful, nevertheless – of the truth, that there were a good many knotty questions to be solved before a man could be quite sure that he had found out the way to set the world thoroughly to rights, and heal all the ills that flesh is heir to.

Hardy treated another of his friend’s most favorite notions even with less respect than this one of “the good cause.” Democracy, that “universal democracy,” which their favorite author had recently declared to be “an inevitable fact of the days in which we live,” was, perhaps, on the whole the pet idea of the small section of liberal young Oxford, with whom Tom was now hand and glove. They lost no opportunity of worshipping it, and doing battle for it; and, indeed, did most of them very truly believe that that state of the world which this universal democracy was to bring about and which was coming no man could say how soon, was to be in fact that age of peace and good-will which men had dreamt of in all times, when the lion should lie down with the kid, and nation should not vex nation any more.

After hearing something to this effect from Tom on several occasions, Hardy cunningly lured him to his rooms on the pretence of talking over the prospects of the boat club, and then, having seated him by the fire, which he himself proceeded to assault gently with the poker, propounded suddenly to him the question:

“Brown, I should like to know what you mean by ‘democracy?’”

Tom at once saw the trap into which he had fallen, and made several efforts to break away, but unsuccessfully; and, being seated to a cup of tea, and allowed to smoke, was then and there grievously oppressed, and mangled, and sat upon, by his oldest and best friend. He took his ground carefully, and propounded only what he felt sure that Hardy himself would at once accept – what no man of any worth could possibly take exception to. “He meant much more,” he said, “than this; but for the present purpose it would be enough for him to say that, whatever else it might mean, democracy in his mouth always meant that every man should have a share in the government of his country.”

Hardy, seeming to acquiesce, and making a sudden change in the subject of their talk, decoyed his innocent guest away from the thought of democracy for a few minutes, by holding up to him the flag of hero-worship, in which worship Tom was, of course, a sedulous believer. Then, having involved him in most difficult country, his persecutor opened fire upon him from masked batteries of the most deadly kind, the guns being all from the armory of his own prophets.

“You long for the rule of the ablest man, everywhere, at all times? To find your ablest man, and then give him power, and obey him – that you hold to be about the highest act of wisdom which a nation can be capable of?”

“Yes; and you know you believe that too, Hardy, just as firmly as I do.”

“I hope so. But then, how about our universal democracy, and every man having a share in the government of his country?”

Tom felt that his flank was turned; in fact, the contrast of his two beliefs had never struck him vividly before, and he was consequently much confused. But Hardy went on tapping a big coal gently with the poker, and gave him time to recover himself and collect his thoughts.

“I don’t mean, of course, that every man is to have an actual share in the government,” he said at last.

“But every man is somehow to have a share; and, if not an actual one, I can’t see what the proposition comes to.”

“I call it having a share in the government when a man has share in saying who shall govern him.”

“Well, you’ll own that’s a very different thing. But, let’s see; will that find our wisest governor for us – letting all the foolishest men in the nation have a say as to who he is to be?”

“Come now, Hardy, I’ve heard you say that you are for manhood suffrage.”

“That’s another question; you let in another idea there. At present we are considering whether the vox populi is the best test for finding your best man. I’m afraid all history is against you.”

“That’s a good joke. Now, there I defy you, Hardy.”

“Begin at the beginning, then, and let us see.”

“I suppose you’ll say, then, that the Egyptian and Babylonian empires were better than the little Jewish republic.”

“Republic! well, let that pass. But I never heard that the Jews elected Moses, or any of the judges.”

“Well, never mind the Jews; they’re an exceptional case: you can’t argue from them.”

“I don’t admit that. I believe just the contrary. But go on.”

“Well, then, what do you say to the glorious Greek republics, with Athens at the head of them?”

“I say that no nation ever treated their best men so badly. I see I must put on a lecture in Aristophanes for your special benefit. Vain, irritable, shallow, suspicious old Demus, with his two oboli in his cheek, and doubting only between Cleon and the sausage-seller, which he shall choose for his wisest man – not to govern, but to serve his whims and caprices. You must call another witness, I think.”

“But that’s a caricature.”

“Take the picture, then, out of Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon, how you will – you won’t mend the matter much. You shouldn’t go so fast, Brown; you won’t mind my saying so, I know. You don’t get clear in your own mind before you pitch into every one who comes across you, and so do your own side (which I admit is mostly the right one) more harm than good.”

Tom couldn’t stand being put down so summarily, and fought over the ground from one country to another, from Rome to the United States, with all the arguments he could muster, but with little success. That unfortunate first admission of his, he felt it throughout, like a mill-stone round his neck, and could not help admitting to himself, when he left, that there was a good deal in Hardy’s concluding remark: “You’ll find it rather a tough business to get your ‘universal democracy,’ and ‘government by the wisest,’ to pull together in one coach.”

Notwithstanding all such occasional reverses and cold baths, however, Tom went on strengthening himself in his new opinions, and maintaining them with all the zeal of a convert. The shelves of his bookcase, and the walls of his room, soon began to show signs of the change which was taking place in his ways of looking at men and things. Hitherto a framed engraving of George III. had hung over his mantel-piece; but early in this, his third year, the frame had disappeared for a few days, and when it reappeared, the solemn face of John Milton looked out from it, while the honest monarch had retired into a portfolio. A facsimile of Magna Charta soon displaced a large colored print of “A Day with the Pycheley;” and soon afterwards the death-warrant of Charles I., with its grim and resolute rows of signatures and seals, appeared on the wall in a place of honor, in the neighborhood of Milton.

XCII

“I can’t for the life of me fancy, I confess,” wrote Tom, “what you think will come of speculating about necessity and free will. I only know that I can hold out my hand before me, and can move it to the right or left, despite of all powers in heaven or earth. As I sit here writing to you I can let into my heart, and give the reins to, all sorts of devils’ passions, or to the Spirit of God. Well, that’s enough for me. I know it of myself, and I believe you know it of yourself, and everybody knows it of themselves or himself; and why you can’t be satisfied with that, passes my comprehension. As if one hasn’t got puzzles enough, and bothers enough, under one’s nose, without going afield after a lot of metaphysical quibbles. No, I’m wrong – not going afield – anything one has to go afield for is all right. What a fellow meets outside himself he isn’t responsible for, and must do the best he can with. But to go on forever looking inside of one’s self, and groping about amongst one’s own sensations, and ideas, and whimsies of one kind and another, I can’t conceive a poorer line of business than that. Don’t you get into it now, that’s a dear boy.

“Very likely you’ll tell me you can’t help it; that every one has his own difficulties, and must fight them out, and that mine are one sort, and yours another. Well, perhaps you may be right. I hope I’m getting to know that my plummet isn’t to measure all the world. But it does seem a pity that men shouldn’t be thinking about how to cure some of the wrongs which poor dear old England is pretty near dying of, instead of taking the edge off their brains, and spending all their steam in speculating about all kinds of things, which wouldn’t make any poor man in the world – or rich one either, for that matter – a bit better off, if they were all found out, and settled to-morrow.”

XCIII

William Cobbett was born in 1762 at Farnham, the third son of a small farmer, honest, industrious, and frugal, from whom, as his famous son writes, “if he derived no honor, he derived no shame,” and who used to boast that he had four boys, the eldest but fifteen, who did as much work as any three men in the parish of Farnham. “When I first trudged afield,” William writes, “with my wooden bottle and satchel slung over my shoulder, I was hardly able to climb the gates and stiles.” From driving the small birds from the turnip-seed and rooks from the peas, he rose to weeding wheat, hoeing peas, and so up to driving the plough for 2d. a day, which paid for the evening school where he learned to read and write, getting in this rough way the rudiments of an education over which he rejoices as he contrasts it triumphantly with that of the “frivolous idiots that are turned out from Winchester and Westminster Schools, or from those dens of dunces called Colleges and Universities,” as having given him the ability to become “one of the greatest terrors to one of the greatest and most powerful bodies of knaves and fools that were ever permitted to afflict this or any other country.”

At eleven he was employed in clipping the boxedgings in the gardens of Farnham Castle, and, hearing from one of the gardeners of the glories of Kew, he started for that place with 1s. 1½d. in his pocket, 3d. of which sum he spent in buying “Swift’s Tale of a Tub.” The book produced a “birth of intellect” in the little rustic. He carried it with him wherever he went, and at twenty-four lost it in a box which fell overboard in the Bay of Fundy, a “loss which gave me greater pain than I have ever felt at losing thousands of pounds.” He returned home, and continued to work for his father till 1782, attending fairs and hearing Washington’s health proposed by his father at farmers’ ordinaries. In that year he went on a visit to Portsmouth, saw the sea for the first time, and was with difficulty hindered from taking service at once on board a man-of-war. He returned home “spoilt for a farmer,” and next year started for London. He served in a solicitor’s office in Gray’s Inn for eight months (where he worked hard at grammar), then enlisted in the 54th regiment, and after a few weeks’ drill at Chatham embarked for Nova Scotia, where the corps were serving. Here his temperate habits, strict performance of duty, and masterly ability and intelligence, raised him in little more than a year to the post of sergeant-major over the heads of fifty comrades his seniors in service. His few spare hours were spent in hard study, especially in acquiring a thorough mastery of grammar. He had bought Lowth’s Grammar, which he wrote out two or three times, got it by heart, and imposed on himself the task of saying it over to himself every time he was posted sentinel. When he had thoroughly mastered it, and could write with ease and correctness, he turned to logic, rhetoric, geometry, French, to Vauban’s fortification, and books on military exercise and evolutions. In this way, by the year 1791, when the 54th was recalled, he had become the most trusted man in the regiment. The colonel used him as a sort of second adjutant; all the paymaster’s accounts were prepared by him; he coached the officers, and used to make out cards with the words of command for many of them, who, on parade, as he scornfully writes, “were commanding me to move my hands and feet in words I had taught them, and were in everything except mere authority my inferiors, and ought to have been commanded by me.” Notwithstanding the masterfulness already showing itself, Cobbett was a strictly obedient soldier, and left the army with the offer of a commission, and the highest character for ability and zeal.

No sooner, however, was his discharge accomplished, than he set himself to work to expose and bring to justice several of the officers of his regiment, who had systematically mulcted the soldiers in their companies of their wretched pay. His thorough knowledge of the regimental accounts made him a formidable accuser; and, after looking into the matter, the then Judge-Advocate-General agreed to prosecute, and a court-martial was summoned at Woolwich for the purpose in 1792. But Cobbett did not appear. He found that it would be necessary to call his clerks, still serving in the regiment, and the consequences to them in those days were likely to be so serious, that he preferred to abandon his attempt. Accordingly, he did not appear, and the fact was bitterly used against him in later days by his political opponents. The whole story is worth reading, and is very fairly given by Mr. Smith. He had now made a happy marriage with the girl to whom he had entrusted all his savings years before, and started with her to Paris; but, hearing on the way of the king’s dethronement, and the Bastile riots, he turned aside and embarked for America.

He arrived in Philadelphia in October 1792, enthusiastic for the land of liberty, and an ardent student of Paine’s works, and set to work to gain his living by teaching English to the French emigrants there, and by such literary work as he could get. In both he was very successful, but soon found himself in fierce antagonism with the American press, and, after publishing several pamphlets, “A Kick for a Bite,” “A Bone to Gnaw for the Democrats,” &c., established his first famous periodical, “Peter Porcupine,” which soon gained him the reputation in England as well as America of a staunch and able loyalist, and severe critic of Republican institutions. The only serious mistake in his American career was his attack on Dr. Priestly, then also an emigrant in Philadelphia. The States had become an undesirable place of residence for him before 1798, when an intimation reached him through the British Embassy that the English Government were sensible of the obligations they owed him, and were prepared to advance his interests. These overtures he steadily refused; but, finding a Royalist’s life was becoming too hot, and having been beaten in a libel suit, which nearly ruined him (though his expenses were nominally defrayed by the subscriptions of his American admirers), he closed the brilliant career of “Peter Porcupine’s Gazette,” and returned to England, having at last, to use his own phrase, “got the better of all diffidence in my own capacity.”

He reached home in 1800, and found himself at once courted and famous. He was entertained by Ministers of State and publishers, but after looking round him in his own sturdy fashion, and finding the condition of the political and literary world by no means to his mind, while that of the great body of the people was becoming worse every day, he resisted all temptations and started on the career which he followed faithfully till his death. In 1802 appeared the first number of “Cobbett’s Political Register,” which (with the break of two months in 1817, when he fled from the new Gagging Act to America) continued to appear weekly till June 1835, and remains a wonderful witness to the strength and the weaknesses of the Sussex ploughboy. During those long years, and all the fierce controversies which marked them, he was grandly faithful, according to his lights, to the cause of the poor: – “I for my part should not be at all surprised,” he wrote in 1806, “if some one were to propose selling the poor, or mortgaging them to the fund-holders. Ah! you may wince; you may cry Jacobin or 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 endeavoring to accomplish this wish nothing but the want of means shall make me desist.” And loyally he maintained the fight against sinecures, place-hunting, and corruption of all kinds until his death, full of years, the member for Oldham, and the popular leader of the widest influence among the Liberal party of the first Reform period. For the incidents of the long struggle – how the government press turned savagely on the man whom they had hailed on his return from America as one “whom no corruption can seduce nor any personal danger intimidate from the performance of his duty;” how Attorney-Generals watched him and prosecuted; how he insisted on conducting his own causes, and so spent two years in jail, and was mulcted again and again in heavy damages; how he fought through it all, and tended his farm and fruit-trees, and wrote his “Rural Rides” and “Cottage Economy,” and was a tender and loving man in his own home, and retained the warm regard of such men as Wyndham and Lord Radnor, while he was the best hated and abused man in England – we must refer all (and we hope there are many) who care to know about them to the second volume of Edward Smith’s life of Cobbett.

There are few lives that we know of better worth careful study in these times. We have no space here to do more than quote the best estimate of the man’s work which has ever come from one of those classes who for thirty-five years looked on him as their most dangerous enemy: —

“I know him well, on every side
Walled round with wilful prejudice;
A self-taught peasant rough in speech,
Self-taught, and confident to teach,
In blame not overwise.

What matter, if an honest thought
Sometimes a homely phrase require?
Let those who fear the bracing air
Look for a milder sky elsewhere,
Or stay beside the fire.

There are worse things in this bad world
Than bitter speech and bearing free —
I hail thee, genuine English born —
Not yet the lineage is outworn
That owns a man like thee.”