Linguists From England

"Not the least interesting of those who idealized the Middle Ages was William Cobbett. Although the supposed virtues of mediaeval barons and monks were certainly useful to hold up in comparison with the failings of later possessors of the soil—the Establishment and the squirearchy—his sincerity in this matter cannot be questioned. It would be a work of supererogation to elaborate on Cobbett's mediaevalism. His books are crowded with appeals to the good old days and denunciations of the new-rich of the Napoleonic wars. What have the people gained, he asks, by the fall of the feudal system? "Talk of vassals! Talk of villains! Talk of serfs! Are there any of these, or did feudal times ever see any of them, so debased, so absolutely slaves, as the poor creatures who, in the ‘enlightened’ north, are compelled to work fourteen hours in a day, in a heat of eighty-four degrees; and who are liable to punishment for looking out at a window of the factory!""

"I was a countryman and a father before I was a writer on political subjects.... Born and bred up in the sweet air myself, I was resolved that [my children] should be bred up in it too."

"[T]he labourers have a right to subsistence out of the land, in all cases of inability to labour; that all those who are able to labour have a right to subsistence out of the land, in exchange for their labour; and that, if the holders of the land will not give them subsistence, in exchange for their labour, they have a right to the land itself."

"A full belly to the labourer was, in my opinion, the foundation of public morals and the only source of real public peace."

"His Rural Rides contain some of the best, most vivid and vigorous writing that has ever appeared in the English language."

"I...had strong feelings excited in my mind against Scotland generally (always expressly making great exceptions) by observing that the scoundrelly “feelosofers”, who preached up a doctrine, tending to cause the people of England to be treated like cattle."

"I am no citizen of the world. It is quite enough for me to think about what is best for England, Ireland and Scotland. I do not like those whose philanthropy is so enlarged as to look, as Rousseau said, to Tartary for objects of affection and commiseration, while their own countrymen are starving, or existing on sea-weed and nettles. I do not approve of any efforts to urge our Government to interfere at all in the affairs even of Poland: it is too distant, too out of the way of our affairs, that we should take one single meal from a weaver or a ploughman for the sake of doing good to the Poles."

"I have a rooted hatred to this police establishment; that I hate it, because it is of foreign growth, and because it is French; that I hate it because it really tears up the government; that good-natured government, that gentle, that confiding, that neighbourly and friendly government, under which I was born, and under which my forefathers lived."

"Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers."

"You make your appeal in Piccadilly, London, amongst those who are wallowing in luxuries, proceeding from the labour of the people. You should have gone to the gravel-pits, and made your appeal to the wretched creatures with bits of sacks around their shoulders, and with hay-bands round their legs; you should have gone to the roadside, and made your appeal to the emaciated, half-dead things who are there cracking stones to make the roads as level as a die for the tax eaters to ride on. What an insult it is, and what an unfeeling, what a cold-blooded hypocrite must he be that can send it forth; what an insult to call upon people under the name of free British labourers; to appeal to them in behalf of Black slaves, when these free British labourers; these poor, mocked, degraded wretches, would be happy to lick the dishes and bowls, out of which the Black slaves have breakfasted, dined, or supped...Talk, indeed, of transmuting the wretched Africans into this condition! ...Will not the care, will not the anxiety of a really humane Englishman be directed towards the Whites, instead of towards the Blacks, until, at any rate, the situation of the former be made to be as good as that of the latter?"

"Good government is known from bad government by this infallible test: that under the former the labouring people are well fed and well clothed, and under the latter, they are badly fed and badly clothed."

"As to the power which money gives, it is that of brute force, it is the power of the bludgeon and the bayonet, and of the bribed press, tongue and pen."

"My dislike of the Jews is that which our forefathers had of them: I dislike them as insolent ruffians, who mock the religion and morality of Christians; I dislike them as people that never work, and form a body of wretches who live by trick; I dislike them as usurers, and the great agents of those systems of usury by which so many nations have so severely suffered; and this nation, above all others; in France they were the rapacious farmers of the taxes; in Poland, in Germany, in Hungary; every where, where they have been allowed to practise their arts of plunder, they have produced ruin to the people, and very frequently to the state."

"Now, this free Government of America...imposed a duty of fifty per cent on foreign wool; and not a word of complaint was heard from any party against that protecting duty. Why, therefore, was all this outcry about the duties which were enforced in this country for the protection of the land, and which, after all, was no protection at all? ...the landlord and farmer had nothing whatever to do with the increase in the price of bread. If the petitioners were rational persons, they would not have asked for cheap bread; they would have asked for a reduction of those taxes that caused the bread to be so high...He did not know but he ought to vote for the repeal of the Corn-laws, upon account of their foolishness, their utter absurdity, and inefficiency. He explained all these things to his constituents, who were just as fond of a cheap loaf as the people of Liverpool, or any other place. He said to them, "Don't go to the landlords to ask for cheap bread, because they cannot give it you. Go to the Government, and tell them to take off the taxes, that the baker may be enabled to give you cheap bread." This was the language he addressed to his constituents. He recollected perfectly well when this Corn Bill was first brought forward he gave it his most strenuous opposition, not because he objected to the principle of the Bill, but solely because he conceived it would be wholly inoperative"

"A print by Bartollotzi, executed in 1801, conveys a correct outline of his person. His eyes are small and pleasingly good-natured. To the French gentleman he was attentive; with his sons familiar; to his servants easy; but to all, in his tone and manner resolute and determined. He feels no hesitation in praising himself, and evidently believes that he is eventually destined to be the Atlas of the British nation. His faculty of relating anecdotes is amusing.—Instances when we meet. My impressions of Mr. Cobbett are, that those who know him would like him, if they can be content to submit unconditionally to his dictation. “Obey me, and I will treat you kindly; if you do not, I will trample on you,” seemed visible in every word and feature. He appears to feel, in its fullest force, the sentiment, “I have no brother, am like no brother, I am myself alone.”"

"All my plans in private life; all my pursuits; all my designs, wishes, and thoughts, have this one great object in view: the overthrow of the ruffian Boroughmongers. If I write grammars; if I write on agriculture; if I sow, plant, or deal in seeds; whatever I do has first in view the destruction of those infamous tyrants."

"To suppose such a thing possible as a society, in which men, who are able and willing to work, cannot support their families, and ought, with a great part of the women, to be compelled to lead a life of celibacy, for fear of having children to be starved; to suppose such a thing possible is monstrous."

"Grammar, perfectly understood, enables us, not only to express our meaning fully and clearly, but so to express it as to enable us to defy the ingenuity of man to give to our words any other meaning than that which we ourselves intend them to express."

"I say...upon this point, what JUDGE BLACKSTONE says; and that is, that the right to resist oppression always exists, but that those who compose the nation at any given time must be left to judge for themselves when oppression has arrived at a pitch to justify the exercise of such right."

"It is no small mischief to a boy, that many of the best years of his life should be devoted to the learning of what can never be of any real use to any human being. His mind is necessarily rendered frivolous and superficial by the long habit of attaching importance to words instead of things; to sound instead of sense."

"Another great evil arising from this desire to be thought rich; or rather, from the desire not to be thought poor, is the destructive thing which has been honoured by the name of “speculation”; but which ought to be called Gambling."

"Women are a sisterhood. They make common cause in behalf of the sex; and, indeed, this is natural enough, when we consider the vast power that the law gives us over them."

"[T]he very best and most virtuous of all mankind, the agricultural labourers of this land, so favoured by God Almighty, and for so many ages the freest and happiest country in the world!"

"If all men were upon an equality in point of means, England would become what the wilds of America are, inhabited by wild men; nobody would work except just to provide food and raiment for the day; and our country would become the most beggarly upon the earth, instead of being what it formerly was (and I hope and trust will be again) the pride of its people and the envy of the world."

"I set out as a sort of self-dependent politician. My opinions were my own. I dashed at all prejudices. I scorned to follow anybody in matter of opinion.... All were, therefore, offended at my presumption, as they deemed it."

"[W]hen our country shall have got a good and cheap government, we can, with clear consciences, recommend the paring of their nails, and the making of them bow to that power which, freed from infernal boroughmongering, will again claim and enforce her dominion of the seas. No American that ever conversed with me upon this subject will deny, that I always said, that I should never die in peace without making them again bow to England; and that bow to her again they should, whenever we shook off the power of the hellish boroughmongers. ... ENGLAND is my country: I must share in all her glory and in all her disgrace; and when it is a question of her honour and well-being, I must cast aside all private recollections and feelings. ... I always said...I never would rest until I saw the Americans acknowledge, explicitly our right to dominion on the seas. I wish them all the happiness that men can enjoy in this world; but a nation may be very happy without being permitted to swagger about and be saucy to England."

"[I]f you maintain that the poor have no right, no legal right, to relief, you loosen all the ligaments of property; and begin that career, which must end in a contest for property between the poor and the rich: you loosen all the bonds of allegiance; you get rid of all its duties; you proclaim that might, and not right, is to prevail; and, in short, you do all in your power to break up the social compact; to produce confusion; and to leave to chance a settlement anew."

"[T]he duty of allegiance implies the reciprocal duty of protection; and we have now seen, that it is the duty of a state to give protection to all the citizens, or persons, living under it, and owing it allegiance. Not only protection against violences committed against the property, or the person, of a man: not only protection against assaults, arsons, and robberies; but against hunger, nakedness, and all those things which expose life and limb to danger. This protection is a condition inseparable from the duty of allegiance; and, if the condition be not observed, the bond in this, as in all other cases, is forfeited."

"[B]efore the passing of the Poor-Law Bill, I wished to avoid [a] convulsive termination. I now do not wish it to be avoided."

"Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Canada are the horns, the head, the neck, the shins, and the hoof of the ox, and the United States are the ribs, the sirloin, the kidneys, and the rest of the body."

"At this time [1815–16] the writings of William Cobbett suddenly became of great authority; they were read on nearly every cottage hearth in the manufacturing districts of South Lancashire, in those of Leicester, Derby, and Nottingham; also in many of the Scottish manufacturing towns. Their influence was speedily visible. He directed his readers to the true cause of their sufferings—misgovernment; and to its proper corrective—parliamentary reform. Riots soon become scarce, and from that time they have never obtained their ancient vogue with the labourers of this country."

"[H]e is always a hearty Englishman. He may vary in his opinions as to doctrines and as to men, but he is ever for making England great, powerful, and prosperous—her people healthy, brave, and free. He never falls into the error of mistaking political economy for the whole of political science. He does not say, “Be wealthy, make money, and care about nothing else.” He advocates rural pursuits as invigorating to a population, although less profitable than manufacturing. He desires to see Englishmen fit for war as well as for peace. There is none of that puling primness about him which marks the philosophers who would have a great nation, like a good boy at a private school, fit for nothing but obedience and books. To use a slang phrase, there was “a go” about him which, despite all his charlatanism, all his eccentricities, kept up the national spirit, and exhibited in this one of the highest merits of political writing. The immense number of all his publications that sold immediately on their appearance, sufficiently proves the wonderful popularity of his style; and it is but just to admit that many of his writings were as useful as popular."

"The pattern John Bull of his century, strong as the rhinoceros, and with singular humanities and genialities shining through his thick skin."

"William Cobbett is the noblest English example of the noble calling of the agitator."

"What did Brandreth do more than was done by the Whigs at the Revolution?"

"What distinguished Cobbett was that he saw more vividly than anybody else what was happening in England: how the England in which he had been born, where he had played on his father's farm, was changing all its features; how the old ways, the old faces, the old charities of life were disappearing; how the new England which was springing up was an England unkind and inhospitable to the poor... In everything that he did and wrote he set himself, by every means that could bring him into touch with the imagination of the people, to arrest the impoverishment of a race and to dethrone the fatal doctrine that the rich could be trusted to act for the poor."

"One has no notion of him as making use of a fine pen, but a great mutton-fist; his style stuns his readers…He is too much for any single newspaper antagonist; "lays waste" a city orator or Member of Parliament, and bears hard upon the Government itself. He is a kind of fourth estate in the politics of the country. He is not only unquestionably the most powerful political writer of the present day, but one of the best writers in the language. He speaks and thinks plain, broad, downright English."

"Cobbett will more and more appear what he really was—a great English patriot. The paramount object of his life was the well-being of England. To that end he devoted all he possessed; to it he sacrificed his own interests, and the interests of those who were dearest to him... When the waves of time have passed again and again over the records of this century, obliterating much that now fills the minds of men, the memory of William Cobbett and his endless struggles will appear in their true significance, and his countrymen will assuredly enrol his name among their worthies as one who lived and fought and died in the service of England."

"An odious fellow on whichever side he fought. I hardly know a worse man."

"Read Cobbett—a much better writer than that charlatan Carlyle."

"Cobbett's kind of Radicalism was the reverse of what it became later in the nineteenth century – a synonym for the ‘Progressive’ who was to detach himself completely from both rural and traditional roots... Though often in conflict and very differently placed in station and conditions of living, all three [labourer, farmer and squire], so far as they fulfil their service to the land, do throughout their history share a common point of view. In his simple forthright English, Cobbett spoke it. In fact, he embodied it... The rural attitude of life, in which the whole English tradition is rooted, sprang to articulate life in Cobbett at the very moment when it was beginning to crumble and give way to alien forces. And it is through him that we not only understand what it was in his time but has always been."

"While we were there, a grand display of English games, especially of single-stick and wrestling, took place under Mr. Cobbett's auspices... [T]his exhibition...she termed barbarous, was the cause of his quarrel with...Mrs. Blamire. In my life I never saw two people in a greater passion. Each was thoroughly persuaded of being in the right, either would have gone to the stake upon it, and of course the longer they argued the more determined became their conviction. They said all manner of uncivil things; they called each other very unpretty names; she got very near to saying, “Sir, you're a savage;” he did say, “Ma'am, you're a fine lady;” they talked, both at once, until they could talk no longer, and I have always considered it as one of the greatest pieces of Christian forgiveness that I ever met with, when Mr. Cobbett, after they had both rather cooled down a little, invited Mrs. Blamire to dine at his house the next day. She, less charitable, declined the invitation, and we parted."

"Nouns of number, or multitude, such as Mob, Parliament, Rabble, House of Commons, Regiment, Court of King's Bench, Den of Thieves, and the like."

"No Englishman could be a more genuine lover of honest industry. He was cut to the heart by the horrible state of degradation into which the British labourer had sunk during, and for twenty years after, the great war... Week by week, and year by year, he went on thundering against the governing classes; but he always inserted saving clauses in his indictment for old descent and the trappings of royalty... Beneath the Radical peep forth infinite possibilities of Tory prejudice... English literature may be searched in vain for such another miniature of southern England as the Rural Rides... Those transcripts of scenery never grow obsolete."

"[Cobbett was] a great writer, a remarkable personality, and, beyond question, the greatest of English radicals. Cobbett was more than a man of the people. He was the people, the voice of the Many."

"Rural Rides is one of the greatest books written in English."

"We want great alteration, but we want nothing new."

"It has long been a fashion amongst you, which you have had the complaisance to adopt at the instigation of a corrupt press, to call every friend of reform, every friend of freedom, a Jacobin, and to accuse him of French principles. ... What are these principles?—That governments were made for the people, and not the people for governments.—That sovereigns reign legally only by virtue of the people's choice.—That birth without merit ought not to command merit without birth.—That all men ought to be equal in the eye of the law.—That no man ought to be taxed or punished by any law to which he has not given his assent by himself or by his representative.—That taxation and representation ought to go hand in hand.—That every man ought to be judged by his peers, or equals.—That the press ought to be free. ... Ten thousand times as much has been written on the subject in England as in all the rest of the world put together. Our books are full of these principles. ... There is not a single political principle which you denominate French, which has not been sanctioned by the struggles of ten generations of Englishmen, the names of many of whom you repeat with veneration, because, apparently, you forget the grounds of their fame. To Tooke, Burdett, Cartwright, and a whole host of patriots of England, Scotland and Ireland, imprisoned or banished, during the administration of Pitt, you can give the name of Jacobins, and accuse them of French principles. Yet, not one principle have they ever attempted to maintain that Hampden and Sydney did not seal with their blood."

"Having still in my recollection so many excellent men, to whose grandfathers, upon the same spots, my grandfather had yielded cheerful obedience and reverence, it is not without sincere sorrow that I have beheld many of the sons of these men driven from their fathers' mansions, or holding them as little better than tenants or stewards, while the swarms of Placemen, Pensioners, Contractors, and Nabobs...have usurped a large part of the soil."

"I cannot...perceive any ground for hoping that any practical good would, while the funding system exists in its present extent, result from the adoption of any of those projects, which have professed to have in view what is called Parliamentary Reform...when the funding system, from whatever cause, shall cease to operate upon civil and political liberty, there will be no need of projects for parliamentary reform. The parliament will, as far as shall be necessary, then reform itself."