William Cobbett

“ Who, amongst all the classes of men, experience, on an average, so little of real pleasure, and so much of real pain as the rich and the lofty? Pope gives us, as the materials for happiness, 'health, peace, and competence.' Aye, but what is peace, and what is competence? If, by peace, he mean that tranquillity of mind which innocence and good deeds produce, he is right and clear so far; for we all know that, without health, which has a well-known positive meaning, there can be no happiness. But competence is a word of unfixed meaning. ”

“ I walked on from Holbeach, six miles, towards Boston; and seeing the fatness of the land, and the fine grass and the never-ending sheep lying about like fat hogs, stretched in the sun, and seeing the abject state of the labouring people, I could not help exclaiming, “God has given us the best country in the world; our brave and wise and virtuous fathers, who built all these magnificent churches, gave us the best government in the world, and we, their cowardly and foolish and profligate sons, have made this once-paradise what we now behold!” ”

“ Poverty leads to all sorts of evil consequences. Want, horrid want, is the great parent of crime. To have a dutiful family, the father’s principle of rule must be love not fear. His sway must be gentle, or he will have only an unwilling and short-lived obedience. But it is given to but few men to be gentle and good-humoured amidst the various torments attendant on pinching poverty. A competence is, therefore, the first thing to be thought of; it is the foundation of all good in the labourer’s dwelling; without it little but misery can be expected. ”

“ But, some one may say, slaves are private property, and may be bought and sold, out and out, like cattle. And, what is it to the slave, whether he be property of one or of many; or, what matters it to him, whether he pass from master to master by a sale for an indefinite term, or be let to hire by the year, month, or week? It is, in no case, the flesh and blood and bones that are sold, but the labour; and, if you actually sell the labour of man, is not that man a slave, though you sell it for only a short time at once? ”

“ The trees are very good, and the woods would be handsomer if the larches and firs were burnt, for which only they are fit. The great beauty of the place is the lofty downs, as steep, in some places, as the roof of a house, which form a sort of boundary, in the form of a part of a crescent, to about a third part of the park, and then slope off and get more distant, for about half another third part. A part of these downs is covered with trees, chiefly beech, the colour of which, at this season, forms a most beautiful contrast with that of the down itself, which is so green and so smooth! ”

“ POVERTY is, after all, the great badge, the never-failing badge, of slavery. Bare bones and rags are the true marks of the real slave. What is the object of Government? To cause men to live happily. They cannot be happy without a sufficiency of food and of raiment. Good government means a state of things in which the main body are well fed and well clothed. It is the chief business of a government to take care, that one part of the people do not cause the other part to lead miserable lives. ”

“ If the man's misconduct, in this respect, bring shame on so many innocent parties, what shame, what dishonour, what misery follow such misconduct in the wife! Her parents, those of her husband, all her relations, and all her friends, share in her dishonour. And her children! how is she to make atonement to them! They are commanded to honour their father and their mother; but not such a mother as this, who, on the contrary, has no claim to any thing from them but hatred, abhorrence, and execration. It is she who has broken the ties of nature; she has dishonoured her own offspring ”

“ The truth is, that the squandered millions are gone! The nation has now to suffer for this squandering. The money served to silence some; to make others bawl; to cause the good to be oppressed; to cause the bad to be exalted; to “crush the Jacobins:” and what is the result? What is the end? The end is not yet come; but as to the result thus far, go, ask the families of those farmers who, after having for so many years threatened to shoot Jacobins, have, in instances not a few, shot themselves! Go, ask the ghosts of Pitt and of Castlereagh what has thus far been the result! ”

“ But as to milk, England yields to no country upon the face of the earth. Neat cattle will touch nothing that is not wholesome in its nature; nothing that is not wholly innoxious. Out of a pail that has ever had grease in it, they will not drink a drop, though they be raging with thirst. Their very breath is fragrance. And how, then, is it possible, that unwholesomeness should distil from the udder of a cow? The milk varies, indeed, in its quality and taste according to the variations in the nature of the food; but no food will a cow touch that is any way hostile to health. ”

“ There are some men, to be sure, who are reduced to poverty by their vices, by idleness, by gaming, by drinking, by squandering; but, the far greater part by bodily ailments, by misfortunes to the effects of which all men may, without any fault, and even without any folly, be exposed: and, is there a man on earth so cruelly unjust as to wish to add to the sufferings of such persons by stripping them of their political rights? How many thousands of industrious and virtuous men have, within these few years, been brought down from a state of competence to that of pauperism! ”

“ Clay is what pots and pans and jugs and tiles are made of; and not soft, whitish stuff that crumbles to pieces in the sun, instead of baking as hard as a stone, and which, in dry weather, is to be broken to pieces by nothing short of a sledge-hammer. The narrow ridges on which the wheat is sown; the water furrows; the water standing in the dips of the pastures; the rusty iron-like colour of the water coming out of some of the banks; the deep ditches; the rusty look of the pastures—all show, that here is a bottom of clay. ”

“ I must hear a great deal more than I ever have heard, to convince me, that teaching children to read tends so much to their happiness, their independence of spirit, their manliness of character, as teaching them to reap. The creature that is in want must be a slave; and to be habituated to labour cheerfully is the only means of preventing nineteen-twentieths of mankind from being in want. ”

“ My American friend said, 'If I had been he, I would, in the first place, have married the poorest and prettiest girl in all France.' If he had done this, he would, in all probability, have now been on an imperial throne, instead of being eaten by worms at the bottom of a very deep hole in Saint Helena; whence, however, his bones convey to the world the moral, that to marry for money, for ambition, or from any motive other than the one pointed out by affection, is not the road to glory, to happiness, or to peace. ”

“ You will see the oak shaved up on the side of the breeze. But the ash stands upright, as if in a warm woody dell. We have no tree that attains a greater height than the ash; and certainly none that equals it in beauty of leaf. It bears pruning better than any other tree. Its timber is one of the most useful; and as underwood and fire-wood it far exceeds all others of English growth. From the trees of an avenue like that of Lord Hardwicke a hundred pounds worth of fuel might, if the trees were ash, be cut every year in prunings necessary to preserve the health and beauty of the trees. ”

“ I have known many a clever man rejected in the way of promotion only because he was addicted to gaming. Men, in that state of life, cannot ruin themselves by gaming, for they possess no fortune, nor money; but the taste for gaming is always regarded as an indication of a radically bad disposition; and I can truly say, that I never in my whole life knew a man, fond of gaming, who was not, in some way or other, a person unworthy of confidence. This vice creeps on by very slow degrees, till, at last, it becomes an ungovernable passion, swallowing up every good and kind feeling of the heart. ”

“ To have no fire, or a bad fire, to sit by, is a most dismal thing. In such a state man and wife must be something out of the common way to be in good humour with each other, to say nothing of colds and other ailments which are the natural consequence of such misery. If we suppose the great Creator to condescend to survey his works in detail, what object can be so pleasing to him as that of the labourer, after his return from the toils of a cold winter day, sitting with his wife and children round a cheerful fire, while the wind whistles in the chimney and the rain pelts the roof? ”

“ But, seriously speaking, what a mess, what a pickle, what a horrible mess, must the thing be in, if any man, or any thousand of men, or any hundred thousand of men, can change the value of money, unhinge all contracts and all engagements, and plunge the pecuniary affairs of a nation into confusion? I have been often accused of wishing to be thought the cleverest man in the country; but surely it is no vanity (for vanity means unjust pretension) for me to think myself the cleverest man in the country, if I can of my own head, and at my own pleasure, produce effects like these. ”