f his _Register_, and his 'two-penny trash' reached
a circulation of 25,000 or 30,000 copies. He became a power in the
land, and anticipated the immediate triumph of reform. The day was not
yet. Sidmouth's measures of repression frightened Cobbett to America
(March 1819), where he wrote his history of the 'last hundred days of
English liberty.' He returned in a couple of years, damaged in
reputation and broken in fortune; but only to carry on the war with
indomitable energy, although with a recklessness and extravagance
which alienated his allies and lowered his character. He tried to
cover his errors by brags and bombast, which became ridiculous, and
which are yet not without significance.

Cobbett came back from America with the relics of Paine. Paine, the
object of his abuse, had become his idol, not because Cobbett cared
much for any abstract political theories, or for religious dogmas.
Paine's merit was that he had attacked paper money. 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.'[188] The '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.[189] Cobbett, 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