第40章 Political Theory(18)

To Cobbett,as to Paine,it seemed that English banknotes were going the way of French assignats and the provincial currency of the Americans.This became one main topic of his tirades,and represented,as he said,the 'Alpha and Omega'of English politics.The theory was simple.The whole borough-mongering system depended upon the inflated currency.Prick that bubble and the whole would collapse.It was absolutely impossible,he said,that the nation should return to cash payments and continue to pay interest on the debt.Should such a thing happen,he declared,he would 'give his poor body up to be broiled on one of Castlereagh's widest-ribbed gridirons.'109The 'gridiron prophecy'became famous;a gridiron was for long a frontispiece to the Register;and Cobbett,far from retracting,went on proving,in the teeth of facts,that it had been fulfilled.His inference was,not that paper should be preserved,but that the debt should be treated with a 'sponge.'

Cobbett,therefore,was an awkward ally of political economists,whose great triumph was the resumption of cash payments,and who regarded repudiation as the deadly sin.The burthen of the debt,meanwhile,was so great that repudiation was well within the limits of possibility.110Cobbett,in their eyes,was an advocate of the grossest dishonesty,and using the basest incentives.Cobbett fully retorted their scorn.The economists belonged to the very class whom he most hated.He was never tired of denouncing Scottish 'feelosophers';he sneers at Adam Smith,111and Ricardo was to him the incarnation of the stock-jobbing interest.Cobbett sympathised instinctively with the doctrine of the French economists that agriculture was the real source of all wealth.He nearly accepts a phrase,erroneously attributed to Windham,'Perish Commerce,'and he argues that commerce was,in fact,of little use,and its monstrous extension at the bottom of all our worst evils.112Nobody could be more heartily opposed to the spirit which animated the political economists and the whole class represented by them.At times he spoke the language of modern Socialists.He defines Capital as 'money taken from the labouring classes,which,being given to army tailors and suchlike,enables them to keep foxhounds and trace their descent from the Normans.'113The most characteristic point of his speculations is his view of the poor-laws.Nobody could speak with more good sense and feeling of the demoralisation which they were actually producing,of the sapping of the spirit of independence,and of all the devices by which the agricultural labourer was losing the happiness enjoyed in early years,But Cobbett's deduction from his principles is peculiar.

'Parson Malthus'is perhaps the favourite object of his most virulent abuse.

'I have hated many men,'he says,'but never any one so much as you.''Icall you parson,'he explains,'because that word includes "boroughmonger"among other meanings,though no single word could be sufficient.'114Cobbett rages against the phrase 'redundant population.'There would be plenty for all if the boroughmongers and stockjobbers could be annihilated,taxes abolished,and the debt repudiated.The ordinary palliatives suggested were little to the taste of this remarkable Radical.The man who approved bull-fighting and supported the slave-trade naturally sneered at 'heddekashun,'and thought savings-banks a mean device to interest the poor in the keeping up of the funds.His remedy was always a sponge applied to the debt,and the abolition of taxes.

This leads,however,to one remarkable conclusion.Cobbett's attack upon the church establishment probably did more to cause alarm than any writings of the day,For Paine's attacks upon its creed he cared little enough.'Your religion,'said a parson to him,'seems to be altogether political.'It might well be,was Cobbett's retort,since his creed was made for him by act of parliament.115In fact,he cared nothing for theology,though he called himself a member of the church of England,and retained an intense dislike for Unitarians,dissenters in general,'saints'as he called the Evangelical party,Scottish Presbyterians,and generally for all religious sects.He looked at church questions solely from one point of view.He had learned,it seems,from a passage in Ruggles's History of the Poor,116that the tithes had been originally intended to support the poor as well as the church.