sons and
sons-in-law to share twenty-four rich livings, besides prebends and
other preferments; and perhaps he would not have sold small beer from
his episcopal palace at Farnham. Cobbett's main doctrine is that when
the Catholic church flourished, the population was actually more
numerous and richer, that the care of the priests and monks made
pauperism impossible, and that ever since the hideous blunder
perpetrated by the reformers everything has been going from bad to
worse. When it was retorted that the census proved the population to
be growing, he replied that the census was a lie. Were the facts truly
stated, he declares, we should have a population of near twenty-eight
million in England by the end of this century,[200] a manifest
_reductio ad absurdum_. If it were remarked that there was a Catholic
church in France, and that Cobbett proves his case by the superiority
of the English poor to the French poor, he remarked summarily that the
French laws were different.[201]

Thus, the one monster evil is the debt, and the taxes turn out to have
been a Protestant invention made necessary by the original act of
plunder. That was Cobbett's doctrine, and, however perverse might be
some of his reasonings, it was clearly to the taste of a large
audience. The poor-law was merely a partial atonement for a vast and
continuous process of plunder. Corrupt as might be its actual
operation, it was a part of the poor man's patrimony, extorted by fear
from the gang of robbers who fattened upon their labours.

Cobbett's theories need not be discussed from the logical or
historical point of view. They are the utterances of a man made
unscrupulous by his desperate circumstances, fighting with boundless
pugnacity, ready to strike any blow, fair or foul, so long as it will
vex his enemies, and help to sell the _Register_. His pugnacity
alienated all his friends. Not only did Whigs and Tories agree in
condemning him, but the Utilitarians hated and despised him, and his
old friends, Burnett and Hunt, were alienated from him, and reviled by
him. His actual followers were a small and insignificant remnant. Yet
Cobbett, like Owen, represented in a crude fashion blind instincts of
no small importance in the coming years. And it is especially to be
noted that in one direction the philosophic Coleridge and the keen
Quarterly Reviewer Southey, and the Socialist Owen and the reactionary
Radical Cobbett, were more in agreement than they knew.