r the great industrial disciple
of the kettle, James Watt (who learnt from it the lesson of the steam
engine), was typical of the age in this, that he found the old Trade
Guilds too fallen, unfashionable and out of touch with the times to help
his discovery, so that he had recourse to the rich minority which had
warred on and weakened those Guilds since the Reformation. There was no
prosperous peasant's pot, such as Henry of Navarre invoked, to enter
into alliance with the kettle. In other words, there was in the strict
sense of the word no commonwealth, because wealth, though more and more
wealthy, was less and less common. Whether it be a credit or discredit,
industrial science and enterprise were in bulk a new experiment of the
old oligarchy; and the old oligarchy had always been ready for new
experiments--beginning with the Reformation. And it is characteristic of
the clear mind which was hidden from many by the hot temper of Cobbett,
that he did see the Reformation as the root of both squirearchy and
industrialism, and called on the people to break away from both. The
people made more effort to do so than is commonly realized. There are
many silences in our somewhat snobbish history; and when the educated
class can easily suppress a revolt, they can still more easily suppress
the record of it. It was so with some of the chief features of that
great mediaeval revolution the failure of which, or rather the betrayal
of which, was the real turning-point of our history. It was so with the
revolts against the religious policy of Henry VIII.; and it was so with
the rick-burning and frame-breaking riots of Cobbett's epoch. The real
mob reappeared for a moment in our history, for just long enough to show
one of the immortal marks of the real mob--ritualism. There is nothing
that strikes the undemocratic doctrinaire so sharply about direct
democratic action as the vanity or mummery of the things done seriously
in the daylight; they astonish him by being as unpractical as a poem or
a prayer. The French Revolutionists stormed an empty prison merely
because it was large and solid and difficult to storm, and therefore
symbolic of the mighty monarchical machinery of which it had been but
the shed. The English rioters laboriously broke in pieces a parish
grindstone, merely because it was large and solid and difficult to
break, and therefore symbolic of the mighty oligarchical machinery which
perpetually ground the faces of the poor.