cheerful. For
Cobbett "did not draw precise diagrams of things as they were. He
only had frantic and fantastic nightmares of things as they are."*
And these nightmares haunted Cobbett's biographer.

[* _Cobbett_, p. 22.]

What he saw was not an Eden that cannot exist, but rather an
Inferno that can exist, and even that does exist. What he saw was the
perishing of the whole English power of self-support, the growth of
cities that drain and dry up the countryside, the growth of dense
dependent populations incapable of finding their own food, the
toppling triumph of machines over men, the sprawling omnipotence of
financiers over patriots, the herding of humanity in nomadic masses
whose very homes are homeless, the terrible necessity of peace and
the terrible probability of war, all the loading up of our little
island like a sinking ship; the wealth that may mean famine and the
culture that may mean despair; the bread of Midas and the sword of
Damocles. In a word, he saw what we see, but he saw it when it was
not there. And some cannot see it--even when it is there.*

[* Ibid., pp. 14, 15.]

Two men had written of the Reformation as the ultimate origin of
these evils at a time when it was still the fashion to treat it as
the dawn of all good. Lingard, himself a Catholic, had written
cautiously, with careful documentation and moderate tone. Cobbett, a
Protestant, had written hastily and furiously, but both men had drawn
in essentials the same picture. Chesterton suspected that Cobbett was
treated with contempt, Lingard with respect, largely because of the
difference in the tone of the two men. Lingard spoke restrainedly but
Cobbett's voice was raised in a loud cry:

He was simply a man who had discovered a crime: ancient like many
crimes; concealed like all crimes. He was as one who had found in a
dark wood the bones of his mother, and suddenly knew she had been
murdered. He knew now that England had been secretly slain. Some, he
would say, might think it a matter of mild regret to be expressed in
murmurs. But when he found a corpse he gave a shout; and if fools
laughed at anyone shouting, he would shout the more, till the world
should be shaken with that terrible cry in the night.

It is that ringing and arresting cry of "Murder!" wrung from him as
he stumbled over those bones of the dead England, that distinguishes
him from all his contemporarie