[In the following excerpt, Brinton provides an overview of Cobbett's political thought, especially in regard to its effect on the Reform Bill of 1832.]

To write about Cobbett as a political thinker implies, in a sense, a false start. For, properly speaking, Cobbett never thought at all. Let us hasten to add that this remark is not a snobbishly intellectualist condemnation of Cobbett, but an attempt to give to the word thought a decently precise meaning. To think implies an effort on the part of the thinker to construct a coherent scheme out of the material of his experience, yet independent of his desires. The possibility of complete detachment on the part of the thinker may well be an illusion, but it is an indispensable illusion. Without it, thought is as immediate, as private, and as unreal as the rest of our sense-experience. Now Cobbett never made any attempt to get outside himself. His responses to experience are as self-centred as a child's. He was naturally enough never really troubled by the reproaches of moral inconsistency to which his career gave rise, and which were on the whole unjust; but, had he been able even to suspect the meaning of the phrase, he would have been equally untroubled by the reproach of logical inconsistency. Put him over against Bentham, Brougham, and Owen, and the contrast is remarkable. Each of these former drew certain assumptions from his temperament and experience; but they erected on these assumptions systems which have a certain amount of what the world has agreed to call logical consistency. Cobbett, too, harboured innumerable generalizations; and he could draw logical inferences in specific cases. But he has nothing like a system. His judgments of value have a peculiar directness and privacy. He actually felt about ideas the way most men—and none more strongly than Cobbett—feel about food and drink. He disliked paper money exactly as he disliked tea. There is no separating the operations of his consciousness. To say that he was prejudiced is quite inadequate. He was not even capable of framing a notion as to the difference between a prejudiced judgment and an unprejudiced one. He was always "morally certain"—that dreadful, and in this world perhaps the sole, form of certitude.

This childish directness which could never distinguish between an appetite and a principle has given Cobbett's work the charm it holds for such men as Mr. Chesterton. Cobbett affords a standing invitation to paradox. Any critic can find him as full of surprises as a human being can be. He had no interest in the imaginative literature of his time; yet in one of the most obvious senses of the word, he was more romantic than Keats or Shelley. For romanticism was in part an attempt to recapture the childhood of the race. Cobbett was—though Wordsworth would have been horrified at the thought—the "mighty prophet, seer blest" of the famous ode. Now this kind of romanticism seeks the richness of sense-life not staled by unduly analytical reflection. It would revive, if we may use the word without Christian overtones of condemnation, the sentient animal in man. Animals are notoriously conservative. They like to be comfortable and undisturbed. Cobbett was a true conservative. What he valued was the good, simple, hearty life of the Englishman of fable— good food, good drink, good labour of the soil that pricks the appetites, the comfortable family life of the den. It is the intellect that finds satisfaction in novelty. Bodily necessity may be the mother of protest, but not of invention. The scheming intellect, then, is the real radical. Now Cobbett lived in a very radical and very uncomfortable age. All the old ways were disappearing. Englishmen were drinking tea and other slops; even their beer was brewed for them, and was acquiring a synthetic, manufactured flavour. Cobbett hated machinery as an animal must hate a treadmill. Moreover, the good life of the human animal, at least, must be a tribal life. Part of its satisfactions must lie in loyalty to a fixed and recognizable group. But the industrial revolution was successful only because it broke up the fixed loyalties of old England. The model for the factory was not, and could not be, the mediaeval parish. Therefore the conservative Cobbett—and this is a paradox Mr. Chesterton makes the most of—became the leading English Radical. But he was a Radical only in the shallow and obvious sense of the word which involves resistance to the existing order. He was a peer of Bentham's only in that he wanted very much less of that of which the utilitarians wanted a great deal more. That both Cobbett and the utilitarians hoped a reform of Parliament would give them what they wanted afforded an accidental common rallying-point.

Cobbett notoriously began his career as a Tory of Tories. Few writers were more vituperative towards the French Revolution, that compound of "Atheism, Robbery, Unitarianism, Swindling, Jacobinism, Massacres, Civic Feasts, and Insurrections." Later he could write of that movement: "In judging the French Revolution, we are not to inquire what fooleries or violences were committed during its progress; but, we are to ask, what has it produced in the end?" In the end, he continues, it has destroyed Bourbon tyranny and given the land to the peasant. The Revolution is justified in its results. Yet few men, not excepting Burke, deserve less to be called turncoats. Cobbett's conversion does not even, as does the conversion in the other direction of the Lake poets, present a subtle problem in psychology. He is an articulate Tory first in America, where the enemies of the England he could not help loving were democrats, Jacobins. On his return to England, he naturally continued to support the Tory party. But as early as 1804 he began to distrust Pitt for his financial measures and his obvious leanings towards the commercial classes. Cobbett was a Tory because he supposed the Tories, like himself, wanted to retain the old England of the soil, the England of manly rural simplicity, the England of hearty squires and heartier yeomen. Melville's impeachment opened his eyes to the existence of financial corruption which he simply had been too faithful to see. The Tory party was sold to the "fund-lords" as completely as the Whigs. Seats in Parliament were actually advertised for sale in the London dailies.

How could one who loathed the cash nexus defend such a state of affairs? Cobbett clung hopefully a while longer to his benefactor Windham. But by 1807 he has given up hope in the Tories. The Political Register has turned to the people of England, still uncorrupted at heart. Their governors have betrayed them. Reform is the only way out. We may take Cobbett at his own word, when, in reply to the Elements of Reform, a pamphlet in which his enemies reprinted some of the bitterest tirades of Porcupine against reformers, he asserted that he had mistaken his men, but not his goal. "The doctrine of consistency, as now in vogue, is the most absurd that ever was broached. It teaches, that, if you once think well of any person or thing, you must always think well of that person or thing." You change your mind, not Yourself.

Cobbett had those gifts of the artist which are indispensable to the journalist and agitator, and which were so sadly lacking in the utilitarians. He could be interesting because he could use hard, tangible phrases that got to work at once on the senses of his readers. He could move men because he felt as they did. He could create in thousands and thousands of men that almost magical cohesion which it is out of the power of the thinker to create. The Political Register, become proudly Twopenny Trash, was the first really popular English journal. After all, the men of England were animals like himself. They, too, found the industrial revolution uncomfortable. It is one of the ironies of history that he pushed them on towards the political capping of the new movement, towards that Reform of 1832, which is the English Revolution of 1789. The survival of mediaeval land tenure in France, and the complete failure of its aristocracy to adjust itself to the new commerce, gave the French Revolution an emotional hold over ordinary Frenchmen which enabled its leaders to overcome the inertia of the many, and achieve the rare miracle of a violent social and political change. In England, conditions for such a miracle were lacking. Thanks to Cobbett, however, Englishmen became excited over the Reform Bill. He made reform seem the common thing, the res publica which it was not.

Any study of Cobbett's political ideas must be an analysis of his likes and dislikes. It must try to illustrate concretely the daily life of his old England, which was simply an extension to others of his own daily life. The basis of that life was domestic. Cobbett valued highly all that Owen so disliked in the family. "Give me, for a beautiful sight, a neat and smart woman, heating her oven and setting in her bread! And, if the bustle do make the sign of labour glisten on her brow, where is the man that would not kiss that off, rather than lick the plaster from the cheek of a duchess." He loved young children, and writes reverently of their "almost boneless limbs" and touching helplessness. This he characteristically erects into a moral absolute. "I never knew a man that was good for much who had a dislike for little children; and I never knew a woman of that taste who was good for anything at all."

Women he worshipped after a satisfying image of his own. "It is, I should imagine, pretty difficult to keep love alive towards a woman who never sees the dew, never beholds the rising sun, and who constantly comes directly from a reeking bed to the breakfast table, and there chews about, without appetite, the choicest morsels of human food." Women must be pure. "It is not enough that a young woman abstain from everything approaching towards indecorum in her behaviour towards men; it is, with me, not enough that she cast down her eyes, or turn aside her head with a smile, when she hears an indelicate allusion: she ought to appear not to understand it, and to receive from it no more impression than if she were a post." She must love her children, and suckle them herself. Cobbett devoted a sermon to "The Unnatural Mother," which shows him at his most domestic. "The motives [for employing a wet-nurse] are two in number, the one, that her beauty may not suffer from the performance of her most sacred duty; the other, too gross, too beastly, to be named, except within the walls of a brothel. Let it be observed, however, that, as to the first motive, it is pretty sure to fail, if beauty be valued on account of its power over the husband. For, the flame of love being past, the fire is kept alive by nothing so effectually as by the fruit of it; and, what becomes of this, if the child be banished to a hireling breast?"

For Cobbett's was a highly decent, almost Victorian, nature. There are no pathological depths in him. He never behaves the way pessimistic Christian ethics assume it is natural for the human animal to behave. His appetites are all healthy. Gluttony he abhors as "the indulgence beyond the absolute demands of nature." He asserts proudly that he never "spent more than thirty-five minutes a day at table, including all the meals of the day." He never played cards, nor wasted time in public houses. He estimates that the fifteen pounds a year the average man throws away in public houses would amount, in the course of a tradesman's life, to a decent fortune for a child. Men spend too much time outside the family circle. He himself had never been an absentee husband. Much of his work was written while the babies were crying—that never disturbed him. He thought the text beginning "Go to the ant, thou sluggard" one of the most beautiful ever penned.

Domestic happiness and natural sobriety formed the foundations of his good life. Work, for its own sake, was an essential. "To wish to live on the labour of others is, besides the folly of it, to contemplate a fraud at the least, and, under certain circumstances, to meditate oppression and robbery." And this must be independent work, work like that of the farmer who reaps where he has sown. It must rest on the institution of private property. These independent workers are united in a society by common tastes, by common forbearances, and by a common love of country. Cobbett never worried over the intellectual opposition between the individual and the group. "A man is so identified with his country, that he cannot, do what he will, wholly alienate himself from it: it can know no triumph, nor any disgrace, which does not, in part, belong to him: parents, brethren, relations, friends, neighbours, make, all taken together, a good half of one's self."

Cobbett, as we have said, never thought of criticizing, or rounding out this moral world of his into a system. He loved the look of the English countryside. He also wanted Englishmen to produce their own food. When, therefore, he ardently defends live and wasteful hedges in contrast to dead and efficient fences, he simply sinks the weaker desire in the stronger. He ought to have felt some sympathy—if sympathies only went by ought to's—for Samuel Johnson, whom he nevertheless calls "old dread-death and dread-devil Johnson, that teacher of moping and melancholy." He disliked the false modesty of "genteelisms" and attacked expressions like "small-clothes"; yet in the very same passage he denies that any modest woman could allow a man to attend her at childbirth. He would have none of Jenner's vaccination—naturally enough he distrusted physicians—but he defends inoculation with smallpox itself. Perhaps the most striking example of his inability to allow facts to influence his judgment is his determined insistence that, census figures to the contrary notwithstanding, the population of England had not greatly increased between 1801 and 1821. Since England took a century, he says, to grow from five millions to eight, it could not possibly have grown from eight millions to eleven in twenty years. This is not a priori reasoning; it is pure romance.

When Cobbett ventures, as he has to venture, into political generalizations, this picturesque immediacy of judgment betrays him. These generalizations carry with them concrete consequences. They influence, according to a law of their own, the very world of likes and dislikes which for Cobbett never changed. The social contract theory and the patriarchal theory do not affect political practice in the same way. Cobbett, as a matter of fact, held them both in a fraternal and unnatural embrace. His political theories are, to use the cant word, rationalizations. But rationalizations do a work of their own in this world, a work Cobbett simply could not understand. Property he thought with Locke was crystallized labour. To live without labour he thought immoral, "unless you have ample fortune whereon to live clear of debt." That rigid adherence to his definition of property would destroy most property in his England apparently did not enter his mind. He did not like property in stocks and bonds, because he did not like the new rich. He thought men of property should care for the poor. He wanted the poor to be self-respecting, and to own a little property of their own. It is all very confusing, and very well meant.

Cobbett accepts an extraordinary amount of the fashionable political theory of the Enlightenment. "These truths are written on the heart of man: that all men are, by nature, equal; that civil society can never have arisen from any motive other than that of the benefit of the whole; that, whenever civil society makes the greater part of the people worse offthan they were under the Law of Nature, the civil compact is, in conscience, dissolved, and all the rights of nature return; that, in civil society, the rights and the duties go hand in hand, and that, when the former are taken away, the latter cease to exist … rights going before duties, as value received goes before payment." Freedom he defined as Macaulay might have defined it: "Freedom is not an empty sound; it is not an abstract idea; it is not a thing that nobody can feel. It means, and it means nothing else, the full and quiet enjoyment of your own property."

Now these free and equal men, banded together under the social contract, each with his own property, will govern themselves by a representative Parliament. "The great right, therefore, of every man, the right of rights, is the right of having a share in the making of the laws, to which the good of the whole makes it his duty to submit." This right is no mere abstract principle. It is a practical matter, for a man who pays taxes should help decide how much he pays and for what purpose the money is spent. Once the whole people share in determining taxation, a lessening of governmental expenditure is inevitable. Cobbett actually uses the Broughamese phrase to describe the ultimate end of government—"cheapness." His government will not even interfere to provide compulsory education. "The general taste of parents and their naturally high opinion of their children's capacities, are quite sufficient to furnish the schools, without the aid of another Act of Parliament and another cursed tax." Finally, he is an exponent of Free Trade.

This is certainly a pretty complete outline of a laissezfaire political philosophy, most of it, let it be noted, in Cobbett's own words. Nothing could be more contrary to what Cobbett really wanted. He had, it is true, that English devotion to the yeomanry ideal, that notion of the individual independent in the castle of his home, which gives a more than abstract force to his distrust of the State. He had an unquestioning devotion to the historical paraphernalia of English rights. But above all he hated the England of fund-lords and manufacturers, and he loved the England of the common people. To protect the common people, to restore them to what he imagined had been their old status, he is willing to use any possible method. "I wish to see the poor men of England what the poor men of England were when I was born," he said in a famous phrase. He is an interventionist in spirit. The tragedy of his life lies in his conviction that the Reformed Parliament would intervene as he desired. He lived to see that Parliament, of which he was a member, pass the new Poor Law.

This desire to intervene in the free play of economic life to protect the poor comes out in all his work. He admired the Church of the Middle Ages because it was the "guardian of the common people," and he is as bitter as Disraeli on the spoliation by which the English Reformation robbed a common thing for the good of a few. Absolute ownership of the land is un-English. "Men lawfully possess only the USE of land and of things attached to the land; and they must take care that in USING them, they do not do injury to any other part of the community, or to the whole of the community taken together." Cobbett brings forward a long list of things a man may not do with his own—such as producing unnecessary noises, smoke, other nuisances, allowing stallions to roam on commons, and so on; he concludes that landlords may not drive tenants and cottagers off their land, that on the contrary they must provide for them. "That there ought to be no legal provision for the poor and destitute; that all such provision is essentially bad; that such provision, even for the aged and infirm, ought not to be made; and that even the giving of alms to the wretched is an evil: these assertions of MALTHUS and BROUGHAM … demand a serious, and, at the same time, an indignant and scornful, refutation."

Cobbett was even willing to achieve his desires by so revolutionary a step as expropriation. He suggests that, if conditions get worse, it may be necessary to make every tenant of house or land worth less than ten pounds a year an owner in fee-simple, indemnifying the present owners with money saved by Governmental economies. His natural conservatism comes out in his respect for a real landed aristocracy, for an aristocracy built on the true patriarchal principle. He contrasts the old "resident native gentry, attached to the soil, known to every farmer and labourer from their childhood, frequently mixing with them in those pursuits where all artificial distinctions are lost," and the modern non-resident gentleman, who merely recuperates on his acres from city dissipations.

Nor are Cobbett's economic notions orthodox. Something—he is never quite sure what—must call a halt to the immoral expansion of wealth. He looks back fondly on the mediaeval prohibition of interest, and regrets that men have abandoned the teaching of the Fathers in this as in so many other respects. Paper money and the whole machinery of credit he loathed. It made possible the sponging existence of the speculator. It upset everyone with the false hope of unearned riches. Accidental success in the hurly-burly turned "those whom nature and good laws [note the phrase 'nature and good laws'] made to black shoes, sweep chimnies or the streets," into men "rolling in carriages, or sitting in saloons surrounded by gaudy footmen with napkins twisted round their thumbs." Paper money brought inevitable inflation, and inflation benefited the adventurer, the man whose assets were as mobile as his principles, and injured the sober, steady man whose assets were fixed. It injured the workman, for wages never rise as rapidly as prices. Yet deflation would bring an unearned gain to all those who had lent money to the nation at the high price level. Cobbett's remedy was characteristically simple and unburdened with theoretical scruples: reduce the interest rate on the national debt. He thought no other solution possible, and offered to allow himself to be broiled alive if the return to a gold basis as provided for in Peel's Bill proved possible. Cobbett never understood the incredible powers of the new industry. In the end, England actually produced enough new goods to balance the increase in the quantity of money brought on by the expenses of the Government in the Napoleonic wars. The new wealth undoubtedly created the world of speculation Cobbett disliked; it undoubtedly corrupted, and then destroyed, his beloved rural England; but it certainly was no fiction.

Cobbett's great failure, after all, was a failure of the understanding. So many of his outraged feelings are the feelings of all honest men that we are inclined to over-much sympathy with him. We, too, dislike the England of his wrath, "the capacious jails and penitentiaries; the stock exchange; the hot and ancle and knee-swelling, and lungdestroying cotton-factories; the whiskered standing army and its splendid barracks; the parson-captains, parson-lieutenants, parson-ensigns and parson-justices; the poor rates and pauper houses; and by no means forgetting, that blessing which is peculiarly and doubly and 'gloriously' protestant, the NATIONAL DEBT." But our sympathies, and the attraction which so able a master of the concrete in words must have for us, ought not to conceal from us Cobbett's weakness as a prophet. With his diagnosis of the political and social evils of his time we may easily agree. In the name of economic freedom, men were exploiting other men. Somehow, the assurance of regularity had gone out of life. For that part of their nature that demands something fixed and eternal, men could find no satisfaction. Cobbett, though he never used the phrase, was as aware as St. Simon or Comte that what his century lacked was a unified scheme of social reconstruction, a universal faith.

But any such faith is a constructive effort of the whole of man's faculties. Men build abiding faiths out of the world of sense-experience in which they live. But what gives to faith an apparent independence of the chaos of experience is the intellectual effort which has gone into the absorption of this experience. In spite of what is still current opinion to the contrary, effective human belief has always an element of reason. For human reason alone can make the adjustment between novelties forced on human experience—the machine, for instance—and habit. Now Cobbett, as we have tried to show, never made this effort of adjustment. In purely personal terms, he merely growled at being disturbed in his habits. In a wider sense applying to the system of ideas he had after all to work with, he sought to maintain the old frame of society, the old specific adjustments to a given situation, and to destroy, or neglect, he was never quite sure which, the new situation. He says definitely that he never sought to change or destroy the institutions of England, but to do away with innovations upon them, the encroachments of aristocracy, and especially of the usurers' aristocracy, new treason laws, combination laws, Bourbon-police laws, taxation, standing armies, agents provocateurs, and so on. Most deeply rooted in Cobbett was that kind of moral solipsism which is the source of much of what goes by the name of Conservatism. He could never even admit the existence of moral values outside himself. Therefore the question of adjusting his scheme of values to altered conditions never troubled him. For as Cobbett lacked the intellectual detachment which would have allowed him to criticize his own habits, so he lacked the imaginative capacity which would have enabled him to salvage those habits, in part at least, in a new faith.

He was, however, too uncomfortable to keep quiet. The very intensity with which he felt a conservative's unhappiness in a changing world prevented his making the compromises with novelty by which most conservatives cheat themselves. He was no Eldon. Something had to be done. We have already explained the pathetic fervour with which he took up the Radical cause. His blundering enthusiasm led him to do the thing most contrary to his ultimate hopes. Were he alive to-day, he would surely be even more unhappy than he was in the England of the Regency. Yet most of what he fought for politically has been achieved. The men of England were no Cobbetts. They were either far more flexible, or far more cowardly, than he. The England of universal suffrage has not proved to be the England of Cottage Economy. Just why Cobbett was so wrong cannot be answered in a formula. Yet it seems most likely that he carried the natural conservatism of the average man to heroism. We may worship heroes, but we do not imitate them. Not even the Englishman will really die for his beer. Indeed, the only kind of heroism that comes near being practical is heroism in defence of the abstract. Cobbett was too attached to common things to be a successful defender of them. We return to his fundamental failure—his failure to use his intellect to correct, build up, and render systematic, and thus shareable with other men, his prejudices.