LETTER TO THE JOURNEYMEN AND LABOURERS OF ENGLAND‚ WALES‚ SCOTLAND‚ AND IRELAND.  LETTER TO JACK HARROW

BY WILLIAM COBBETT

LETTER TO THE JOURNEYMEN AND LABOURERS OF ENGLAND‚ WALES‚ SCOTLAND‚
AND IRELAND‚ ON THE CAUSE OF THEIR PRESENT MISERIES; ON THE MEASURES
WHICH HAVE PRODUCED THAT CAUSE; ON THE REMEDIES WHICH SOME FOOLISH AND
SOME CRUEL AND INSOLENT MEN HAVE PROPOSED; AND ON THE LINE OF CONDUCT
WHICH JOURNEYMEN AND LABOURERS OUGHT TO PURSUE‚ IN ORDER TO OBTAIN
EFFECTUAL RELIEF‚ AND TO ASSIST IN PROMOTING THE TRANQUILLITY AND
RESTORING THE HAPPINESS OF THEIR COUNTRY.

Friends And Fellow-countrymen ­Whatever the pride of rank, of riches, or of scholarship may have induced some men to believe, or to affect to believe, the real strength and all the resources of a country ever have sprung and ever must spring from the labour of its people; and hence it is that this nation, which is so small in numbers and so poor in climate and soil compared with many others, has, for many ages, been the most powerful nation in the world:  it is the most industrious, the most laborious, and, therefore, the most powerful.  Elegant dresses, superb furniture, stately buildings, fine roads and canals, fleet horses and carriages, numerous and stout ships, warehouses teeming with goods; all these, and many other objects that fall under our view, are so many marks of national wealth and resources.  But all these spring from labour.  Without the journeyman and the labourer none of them could exist; without the assistance of their hands the country would be a wilderness, hardly worth the notice of an invader.

As it is the labour of those who toil which makes a country abound in resources, so it is the same class of men, who must, by their arms, secure its safety and uphold its fame.  Titles and immense sums of money have been bestowed upon numerous Naval and Military Commanders.  Without calling the justice of these in question, we may assert that the victories were obtained by you and your fathers and brothers and sons, in co-operation with those Commanders, who, with your aid, have done great and wonderful things; but who, without that aid, would have been as impotent as children at the breast.

With this correct idea of your own worth in your minds, with what indignation must you hear yourselves called the Populace, the Rabble, the Mob, the Swinish Multitude; and with what greater indignation, if possible, must you hear the projects of those cool and cruel and insolent men, who, now that you have been, without any fault of yours, brought into a state of misery, propose to narrow the limit of parish relief, to prevent you from marrying in the days of your youth, or to thrust you out to seek your bread in foreign lands, never more to behold your parents or friends?  But suppress your indignation, until we return to this topic, after we have considered the cause of your present misery, and the measures which have produced that cause.

The times in which we live are full of peril.  The nation, as described by the very creatures of Government, is fast advancing to that period when an important change must take place.  It is the lot of mankind that some shall labour with their limbs and others with their minds; and, on all occasions, more especially on an occasion like the present, it is the duty of the latter to come to the assistance of the former.  We are all equally interested in the peace and happiness of our common country.  It is of the utmost importance that, in the seeking to obtain these objects, our endeavours should be uniform, and tend all to the same point.  Such an uniformity cannot exist without an uniformity of sentiment as to public matters, and to produce this latter uniformity amongst you is the object of this address.

As to the cause of our present miseries, it is the enormous amount of the taxes which the Government compels us to pay for the support of its army, its placemen, its pensioners, etc., and for the payment of the interest of its debt.  That this is the real cause has been a thousand times proved; and it is now so acknowledged by the creatures of the Government themselves.  Two hundred and five of the Correspondents of the Board of Agriculture ascribe the ruin of the country to taxation.  Numerous writers, formerly the friends of the Pitt system, now declare that taxation has been the cause of our distress.  Indeed, when we compare our present state to the state of the country previous to the wars against France, we must see that our present misery is owing to no other cause.  The taxes then annually raised amounted to about fifteen millions:  they amounted last year to seventy millions.  The nation was then happy; it is now miserable.

The writers and speakers who labour in the cause of corruption, have taken great pains to make the labouring classes believe that they are not taxed; that the taxes which are paid by the landlords, farmers, and tradesmen, do not affect you, the journeymen and labourers; and that the tax-makers have been very lenient towards you.  But, I hope that you see to the bottom of these things now.  You must be sensible that if all your employers were totally ruined in one day, you would be wholly without employment and without bread; and, of course, in whatever degree your employers are deprived of their means, they must withhold means from you.  In America the most awkward common labourer receives five shillings a day, while provisions are cheaper in that country than in this.  Here, a carter, boarded in the house, receives about seven pounds a year; in America, he receives about thirty pounds a year.  What is it that makes this difference?  Why, in America the whole of the taxes do not amount to more than about ten shillings a head upon the whole of the population; while in England they amount to nearly six pounds a head! There, a journeyman or labourer may support his family well, and save from thirty to sixty pounds a year:  here, he amongst you is a lucky man, who can provide his family with food and with decent clothes to cover them, without any hope of possessing a penny in the days of sickness or of old age. There, the Chief Magistrate receives six thousand pounds a year; here, the civil list surpasses a million of pounds in amount, and as much is allowed to each of the Princesses in one year, as the chief magistrate of America receives in two years, though that country is nearly equal to this in population.

A Mr. Preston, a lawyer of great eminence, and a great praiser of Pitt, has just published a pamphlet, in which is this remark:  ’It should always be remembered, that the eighteen pounds a year paid to any placeman or pensioner, withdraws from the public the means of giving active employment to one individual as the head of a family; thus depriving five persons of the means of sustenance from the fruits of honest industry and active labour, and rendering them paupers.’  Thus this supporter of Pitt acknowledges the great truth that the taxes are the cause of a people’s poverty and misery and degradation.  We did not stand in need of this acknowledgment; the fact has been clearly proved before; but it is good for us to see the friends and admirers of Pitt brought to make this confession.

It has been attempted to puzzle you with this sort of question:  ’If taxes be the cause of the people’s misery, how comes it that they were not so miserable before the taxes were reduced as they are now?’ Here is a fallacy which you will be careful to detect.  I know that the taxes have been reduced; that is to say, nominally reduced, but not so in fact; on the contrary, they have, in reality, been greatly augmented.  This has been done by the sleight-of-hand of paper money.  Suppose, for instance, that four years ago, I had a hundred pounds to pay in taxes, then a hundred and thirty bushels of wheat would have paid my share.  If I have now seventy-five pounds to pay in taxes, it will require a hundred and ninety bushels of wheat to pay my share of taxes.  Consequently, though my taxes are nominally reduced, they are, in reality, greatly augmented.  This has been done by the legerdemain of paper money.  In 1812, the pound-note was worth only thirteen shillings in silver.  It is now worth twenty shillings.  Therefore, when we now pay a pound-note to the tax-gatherer, we really pay him twenty shillings where we before paid him thirteen shillings; and the Landholders who lent pound-notes worth thirteen shillings each, are now paid their interest in pounds worth twenty shillings each.  And the thing is come to what Sir Francis Burdett told the Parliament it would come to.  He told them in 1811, that if they ever attempted to pay the interest of their debt in gold and silver, or in paper money equal in value to gold and silver, the farmers and tradesmen must be ruined, and the journeymen and labourers reduced to the last stage of misery.

Thus, then, it is clear that it is the weight of the taxes, under which you are sinking, which has already pressed so many of you down into the state of paupers, and which now threatens to deprive many of you of your existence.  We next come to consider what have been the causes of this weight of taxes.  Here we must go back a little in our history, and you will soon see that this intolerable weight has all proceeded from the want of a Parliamentary Reform.

In the year 1764, soon after the present king came to the throne, the annual interest of the Debt amounted to about five millions, and the whole of the taxes to about nine millions.  But, soon after this, a war was entered on to compel the Americans to submit to be taxed by the Parliament, without being represented in that Parliament.  The Americans triumphed, and, after the war was over, the annual interest of the Debt amounted to about nine millions, and the whole of the taxes to about fifteen millions.  This was our situation when the French people began their Revolution.  The French people had so long been the slaves of a despotic government, that the friends of freedom in England rejoiced at their emancipation.  The cause of Reform, which had never ceased to have supporters in England for a great many years, now acquired new life, and the Reformers urged the Parliament to grant reform, instead of going to war against the people of France.  The Reformers said:  ’Give the nation reform, and you need fear no revolution.’  The Parliament, instead of listening to the Reformers, crushed them, and went to war against the people of France; and the consequence of these wars is, that the annual interest of the Debt now amounts to forty-five millions, and the whole of the taxes, during each of the last several years, to seventy millions.  So that these wars have ADDED thirty-six millions a year to the interest of the Debt, and fifty-five millions a year to the amount of the whole of the taxes!  This is the price that we have paid for having checked (for it is only checked) the progress of liberty in France; for having forced upon that people the family of Bourbon, and for having enabled another branch of that same family to restore the bloody Inquisition, which Napoleon had put down.

Since the restoration of the Bourbons and of the old Government of France has been, as far as possible, the grand result of the contest; since this has been the end of all our fightings and all our past sacrifices and present misery and degradation; let us see (for the inquiry is now very full of interest) what sort of Government that was which the French people had just destroyed, when our Government began its wars against that people.

If, only twenty-eight years ago, any man in England had said that the Government of France was one that ought to be suffered to exist, he would have been hooted out of any company.  It is notorious that that Government was a cruel despotism; and that we and our forefathers always called it such.  This description of that Government is to be found in all our histories, in all our Parliamentary debates, in all our books on Government and politics.  It is notorious, that the family of Bourbon has produced the most perfidious and bloody monsters that ever disgraced the human form.  It is notorious that millions of Frenchmen have been butchered, and burnt, and driven into exile by their commands.  It is recorded, even in the history of France, that one of them said that the putrid carcass of a Protestant smelt sweet to him.  Even in these latter times, so late as the reign of Louis XIV., it is notorious that hundreds of thousands of innocent people were put to the most cruel death.  In some instances, they were burnt in their houses; in others they were shut into lower rooms, while the incessant noise of kettle-drums over their heads, day and night, drove them to raving madness.  To enumerate all the infernal means employed by this tyrant to torture and kill the people, would fill a volume.  Exile was the lot of those who escaped the swords, the wheels, the axes, the gibbets, the torches of his hell-hounds.  England was the place of refuge for many of these persecuted people.  The grandfather of the present Earl of Radnor, and the father of the venerable Baron Maseres were amongst them; and it is well known that England owes no inconsiderable part of her manufacturing skill and industry to that atrocious persecution.  Enemies of freedom, wherever it existed, this family of Bourbon, in the reign of Louis XIV. and XV., fitted out expeditions for the purpose of restoring the Stuarts to the throne of England, and thereby caused great expense and blood-shed to this nation; and, even the Louis who was beheaded by his subjects, did, in the most perfidious manner, make war upon England, during her war with America.  No matter what was the nature of the cause, his conduct was perfidious; he professed peace while he was preparing for war.  His object could not be to assist freedom, because his own subjects were slaves.

Such was the family that were ruling in France when the French Revolution began.  After it was resolved to go to war against the people of France, all the hirelings of corruption were set to work to gloss over the character and conduct of the old Government, and to paint in the most horrid colours the acts of vengeance which the people were inflicting on the numerous tyrants, civil, military, and ecclesiastical, whom the change of things had placed at their mercy.  The people’s turn was now come, and, in the days of their power, they justly bore in mind the oppressions which they and their forefathers had endured.  The taxes imposed by the Government became at last intolerable.  It had contracted a great debt to carry on its wars.  In order to be able to pay the interest of this debt, and to support an enormous standing army in time of peace, it laid upon the people burdens which they could no longer endure.  It fined and flogged fathers and mothers if their children were detected in smuggling.  Its courts of justice were filled with cruel and base judges.  The nobility treated the common people like dogs; these latter were compelled to serve as soldiers, but were excluded from all share, or chance of honour and command, which were engrossed by the nobility.

Now, when the time came for the people to have the power in their hands, was it surprising that the first use they made of it was to take vengeance on their oppressors?  I will not answer this question myself.  It shall be answered by Mr. Arthur Young, the present Secretary of the Board of Agriculture.  He was in France at the time, and living upon the very spot, and having examined into the causes of the Revolution, he wrote and published the following remarks, in his Travels, vol. i. page 603: ­

’It is impossible to justify the excesses of the people on their taking up arms; they were certainly guilty of cruelties; it is idle to deny the facts, for they have been proved too clearly to admit of doubt.  But is it really the people to whom we are to impute the whole?  Or to their oppressors, who had kept them so long in a state of bondage?  He who chooses to be served by slaves and by ill-treated slaves, must know that he holds both his property and his life by a tenure far different from those who prefer the service of well-treated freemen; and he who dines to the music of groaning sufferers, must not, in the moment of insurrection, complain that his sons’ throats are cut.  When such evils happen, they surely are more imputable to the tyranny of the master than to the cruelty of the servant.  The analogy holds with the French peasants.  The murder of a seigneur, or a country seat in flames, is recorded in every newspaper; the rank of the person who suffers attracts notice; but where do we find the registers of that seigneur’s oppressions of his peasantry, and his exactions of feudal services from those whose children were dying around them for want of bread?  Where do we find the minutes that assigned these starving wretches to some vile pettifogger, to be fleeced by impositions, and mockery of justice, in the seigneural courts?  Who gives us the awards of the Intendant and his sub-delegues, which took off the taxes of a man of fashion, and laid them with accumulated weight on the poor, who were so unfortunate as to be his neighbours?  Who has dwelt sufficiently upon explaining all the ramifications of despotism, regal, aristocratical, and ecclesiastical, pervading the whole mass of the people; reaching, like a circulating fluid, the most distant capillary tubes of poverty and wretchedness?  In these cases the sufferers are too ignoble to be known; and the mass too indiscriminate to be pitied.  But should a philosopher feel and reason thus?  Should he mistake the cause for the effect? and, giving all his pity to the few, feel no compassion for the many, because they suffer in his eyes not individually but by millions?  The excesses of the people cannot, I fear, be justified; it would undoubtedly have done them credit, both as men and as Christians, if they had possessed their new acquired power with moderation.  But let it be remembered that the populace in no country ever use power with moderation; excess is inherent in their aggregate constitution:  and as every Government in the world knows that violence infallibly attends power in such hands, it is doubly bound in common sense, and for common safety, so to conduct itself, that the people may not find an interest in public confusions.  They will always suffer much and long, before they are effectually roused; nothing, therefore, can kindle the flame but such oppressions of some classes or order in society as give able men the opportunity of seconding the general mass; discontent will diffuse itself around; and if the Government take not warning in time, it is alone answerable for all the burnings and all the plunderings and all the devastation and all the blood that follow.’

Who can deny the justice of these observations?  It was the Government alone that was justly chargeable with the excesses committed in this early stage, and, in fact, in every other stage, of the Revolution of France.  If the Government had given way in time, none of these excesses would have been committed.  If it had listened to the complaints, the prayers, the supplications, the cries of the cruelly-treated and starving people; if it had changed its conduct, reduced its expenses, it might have been safe under the protection of the peace-officers, and might have disbanded its standing army.  But it persevered; it relied upon the bayonet, and upon its judges and hangmen.  The latter were destroyed, and the former went over to the side of the people.  Was it any wonder that the people burnt the houses of their oppressors, and killed the owners and their families?  The country contained thousands upon thousands of men that had been ruined by taxation, and by judgments of infamous courts of justice, ’a mockery of justice’; and, when these ruined men saw their oppressors at their feet, was it any wonder that they took vengeance upon them?  Was it any wonder that the son, who had seen his father and mother flogged, because he, when a child, had smuggled a handful of salt, should burn for an occasion to shoot through the head the ruffians who had thus lacerated the bodies of his parents?  Moses slew the insolent Egyptian who had smitten one of his countrymen in bondage.  Yet Moses has never been called either a murderer or a cruel wretch for this act; and the bondage of the Israelites was light as a feather compared to the tyranny under which the people of France had groaned for ages.  Moses resisted oppression in the only way that resistance was in his power.  He knew that his countrymen had no chance of justice in any court; he knew that petitions against his oppressors were all in vain; and ‘looking upon the burdens’ of his countrymen, he resolved to begin the only sort of resistance that was left him.  Yet it was little more than a mere insult that drew forth his anger and resistance; and, if Moses was justified, as he clearly was, what needs there any apology for the people of France?

It seems at first sight very strange that the Government of France should not have ‘taken warning in time.’  But it had so long been in the habit of despising the people that its mind was incapable of entertaining any notion of danger from the oppressions heaped upon them.  It was surrounded with panders and parasites who told it nothing but flattering falsehoods; and it saw itself supported by two hundred and fifty thousand bayonets, which it thought irresistible; though it found in the end that those who wielded those bayonets were not long so base as to be induced, either by threats or promises, to butcher their brothers and sisters and parents.  And, if you ask me how it came to pass that they did not ‘take warning in time,’ I answer that they did take warning, but that, seeing that the change which was coming would deprive them of a great part of their power and emoluments, they resolved to resist the change, and to destroy the country, if possible, rather than not have all its wealth and power to themselves.  The ruffian whom we read of, a little time ago, who stabbed a young woman because she was breaking from him to take the arm of another man whom she preferred, acted upon the principle of the ministers, the noblesse, and the clergy of France.  They could no longer unjustly possess, therefore they would destroy.  They saw that if a just government were established; that if the people were fairly represented in a national council; they saw that if this were to take place, they would no longer be able to wallow in wealth at the expense of the people; and, seeing this, they resolved to throw all into confusion, and, if possible, to make a heap of ruins of that country which they could no longer oppress, and the substance of which they could no longer devour.

Talk of violence indeed!  Was there anything too violent, anything too severe to be inflicted on these men?  It was they who produced confusion; it was they who caused the massacres and guillotinings; it was they who destroyed the kingly government; it was they who brought the king to the block.  They were answerable for all and for every single part of the mischief, as much as Pharaoh was for the plagues in Egypt, which history of Pharaoh seems, by the bye, to be intended as a lesson to all future tyrants.  He ’set taskmasters over the Israelites to afflict them with burdens; and he made them build treasure cities for him; he made them serve with rigour; he made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar and in brick, and in all manner of service of the field; he denied them straw, and insisted upon their making the same quantity of bricks, and because they were unable to obey, the taskmasters called them idle and beat them.’  Was it too much to scourge and to destroy all the first-born of men who could tolerate, assist, and uphold a tyrant like this?  Yet was Pharaoh less an oppressor than the old government of France.

Thus, then, we have a view of the former state of that country, by wars against the people of which we have been brought into our present state of misery.  There are many of the hirelings of corruption, who actually insist on it that we ought now to go to war again for the restoring of all the cruel despotism which formerly existed in France.  This is what cannot be done, however.  Our wars have sent back the Bourbons; but the tithes, the seigneurs, and many other curses have not been restored.  The French people still enjoy much of the benefit of the Revolution; and great numbers of their ancient petty tyrants have been destroyed.  So that even were things to remain as they are, the French people have gained greatly by their Revolution.  But things cannot remain as they are.  Better days are at hand.

In proceeding now to examine the remedies for your distresses, I shall first notice some of those which foolish, or cruel and insolent men have proposed.  Seeing that the cause of your misery is the weight of taxation, one would expect to hear of nothing but a reduction of taxation in the way of remedy; but from the friends of corruption never do we hear of any such remedy.  To hear them, one would think that you had been the guilty cause of the misery you suffer; and that you, and you alone, ought to be made answerable for what has taken place.  The emissaries of corruption are now continually crying out against the weight of the Poor-rates, and they seem to regard all that is taken in that way as a dead loss to the Government!  Their project is to deny relief to all who are able to work.  But what is the use of your being able to work, if no one will, or can, give you work?  To tell you that you must work for your bread, and, at the same time, not to find any work for you, is full as bad as it would be to order you to make bricks without straw.  Indeed, it is rather more cruel and insolent; for Pharaoh’s taskmasters did point out to the Israelites that they might go into the fields and get stubble.  The Courier newspaper of the 9th of October, says, ’We must thus be cruel only to be kind.’  I am persuaded that you will not understand this kindness, while you will easily understand the cruelty.  The notion of these people seems to be that everybody that receives money out of the taxes has a right to receive it, except you.  They tremble at the fearful amount of the Poor-rates:  they say, and very truly, that those rates have risen from two and a half to eight or ten millions since the beginning of the wars against the people of France; they think, and not without reason, that these rates will soon swallow up nearly all the rent of the land.  These assertions and apprehensions are perfectly well founded; but how can you help it?  You have not had the management of the affairs of the nation.  It is not you who have ruined the farmers and tradesmen.  You only want food and raiment:  you are ready to work for it; but you cannot go naked and without food.

But the complaints of these persons against you are the more unreasonable, because they say not a word against the sums paid to sinecure placemen and pensioners.  Of the five hundred and more Correspondents of the Board of Agriculture, there are scarcely ten who do not complain of the weight of the Poor-rates, of the immense sums taken away from them by the poor, and many of them complain of the idleness of the poor.  But not one single man complains of the immense sums taken away to support sinecure placemen, who do nothing for their money, and to support pensioners, many of whom are women and children, the wives and daughters of the nobility and other persons in high life, and who can do nothing, and never can have done anything for what they receive.  There are of these places and pensions all sizes, from twenty pounds to thirty thousand and nearly forty thousand pounds a year!  And surely these ought to be done away before any proposition be made to take the parish allowance from any of you who are unable to work, or to find work to do.  There are several individual placemen, the profits of each of which would maintain a thousand families.  The names of the ladies upon the pension list would, if printed, one under another, fill a sheet of paper like this.  And is it not, then, base and cruel at the same time in these Agricultural correspondents to cry out so loudly against the charge of supporting the unfortunate poor, while they utter not a word of complaint against the sinecure places and pensions?

The unfortunate journeymen and labourers and their families have a right, they have a just claim, to relief from the purses of the rich.  For there can exist no riches and no resources which they by their labour have not assisted to create.  But I should be glad to know how the sinecure placemen and lady pensioners have assisted to create food and raiment, or the means of producing them.  The labourer who is out of work or ill, to-day, may be able to work, and set to work to-morrow.  While those placemen and pensioners never can work; or, at least, it is clear that they never intend to do it.

You have been represented by the Times newspaper, by the Courier, by the Morning Post, by the Morning Herald, and others, as the scum of society.  They say that you have no business at public meetings; that you are rabble, and that you pay no taxes.  These insolent hirelings, who wallow in wealth, would not be able to put their abuse of you in print were it not for your labour.  You create all that is an object of taxation; for even the land itself would be good for nothing without your labour.  But are you not taxed?  Do you pay no taxes?  One of the correspondents of the Board of Agriculture has said that care has been taken to lay as little tax as possible on the articles used by you.  One would wonder how a man could be found impudent enough to put an assertion like this upon paper.  But the people of this country have so long been insulted by such men, that the insolence of the latter knows no bounds.

The tax gatherers do not, indeed, come to you and demand money of you:  but there are few articles which you use, in the purchase of which you do not pay a tax.

On your shoes, salt, beer, malt, hops, tea, sugar, candles, soap, paper, coffee, spirits, glass of your windows, bricks and tiles, tobacco:  on all these, and many other articles you pay a tax, and even on your loaf you pay a tax, because everything is taxed from which the loaf proceeds.  In several cases the tax amounts to more than one half of what you pay for the article itself; these taxes go in part to support sinecure placemen and pensioners; and the ruffians of the hired press call you the scum of society, and deny that you have any right to show your faces at any public meeting to petition for a reform, or for the removal of any abuse whatever!

Mr. Preston, whom I quoted before, and who is a member of Parliament and has a large estate, says upon this subject, ’Every family, even of the poorest labourer, consisting of five persons, may be considered as paying, in indirect taxes, at least ten pounds a year, or more than half his wages at seven shillings a week!’ And yet the insolent hirelings call you the mob, the rabble, the scum, the swinish multitude, and say that your voice is nothing; that you have no business at public meetings; and that you are, and ought to be considered as nothing in the body politic!  Shall we never see the day when these men will change their tone!  Will they never cease to look upon us [as on] brutes!  I trust they will change their tone, and that the day of the change is at no great distance!

The weight of the Poor-rate, which must increase while the present system continues, alarms the corrupt, who plainly see that what is paid to relieve you, they cannot have.  Some of them, therefore, hint at your early marriages as a great evil, and a clergyman named Malthus has seriously proposed measures for checking you in this respect; while one of the correspondents of the Board of Agriculture complains of the increase of bastards, and proposes severe punishment on the parents!  How hard these men are to please!  What would they have you do?  As some have called you the swinish multitude, would it be much wonder if they were to propose to serve you as families of young pigs are served?  Or if they were to bring forward the measure of Pharaoh, who ordered the midwives to kill all the male children of the Israelites?

But, if you can restrain your indignation at these insolent notions and schemes, with what feelings must you look upon the condition of your country, where the increase of the people is now looked upon as a curse!  Thus, however, has it always been, in all countries where taxes have produced excessive misery.  Our countryman, Mr. Gibbon, in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, has the following passage:  ’The horrid practice of murdering their new-born infants was become every day more frequent in the provinces.  It was the effect of distress, and the distress was principally occasioned by the intolerable burden of taxes, and by the vexatious as well as cruel prosecutions of the officers of the revenue against their insolvent debtors.  The less opulent or less industrious part of mankind, instead of rejoicing at an increase of family, deemed it an act of paternal tenderness to release the children from the impending miseries of a life which they themselves were unable to support.’

But that which took place under the base Emperor Constantine will not take place in England.  You will not murder your new-born infants, nor will you, to please the corrupt and insolent, debar yourselves from enjoyments to which you are invited by the very first of Nature’s laws.  It is, however, a disgrace to the country that men should be found in it capable of putting ideas so insolent upon paper.  So, then, a young man arm-in-arm with a rosy-cheeked girl must be a spectacle of evil omen!  What! and do they imagine that you are thus to be extinguished, because some of you are now (without any fault of yours) unable to find work?  As far as you were wanted to labour, to fight, or to pay taxes, you were welcome, and they boasted of your numbers; but now that your country has been brought into a state of misery, these corrupt and insolent men are busied with schemes for getting rid of you.  Just as if you had not as good a right to live and to love and to marry as they have!  They do not propose, far from it, to check the breeding of sinecure placemen and pensioners, who are supported in part by the taxes which you help to pay.  They say not a word about the whole families who are upon the pension list.  In many cases there are sums granted in trust for the children of such a lord or such a lady.  And while labourers and journeymen who have large families too, are actually paying taxes for the support of these lords’ and ladies’ children, these cruel and insolent men propose that they shall have no relief, and that their having children ought to be checked!  To such a subject no words can do justice.  You will feel as you ought to feel; and to the effect of your feelings I leave these cruel and insolent men.

There is one more scheme to notice, which, though rather less against nature is not less hateful and insolent; namely, to encourage you to emigrate to foreign countries.  This scheme is distinctly proposed to the Government by one of the correspondents of the Board of Agriculture.  What he means by encouragement must be to send away by force, or by paying for the passage; for a man who has money stands in no need of relief.  But, I trust, that not a man of you will move, let the encouragement be what it may.  It is impossible for many to go, though the prospect be ever so fair.  We must stand by our country, and it is base not to stand by her, as long as there is a chance of seeing her what she ought to be.  But the proposition is, nevertheless, base and insolent This man did not propose to encourage the sinecure placemen and pensioners to emigrate; yet, surely, you who help to maintain them by the taxes which you pay, have as good a right to remain in the country as they have!  You have fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers and children and friends as well as they; but this base projector recommends that you may be encouraged to leave your relations and friends for ever; while he would have the sinecure placemen and pensioners remain quietly where they are!

No:  you will not leave your country.  If you have suffered much and long, you have the greater right to remain in the hope of seeing better days.  And I beseech you not to look upon yourselves as the scum; but, on the contrary, to be well persuaded that a great deal will depend upon your exertions; and therefore, I now proceed to point out to you what appears to me to be the line of conduct which journeymen and labourers ought to pursue in order to obtain effectual relief, and to assist in promoting tranquillity and restoring the happiness of the country.

We have seen that the cause of our miseries is the burden of taxes occasioned by wars, by standing armies, by sinécures, by pensions, etc.  It would be endless and useless to enumerate all the different heads or sums of expenditure.  The remedy is what we have now to look to, and that remedy consists wholly and solely of such a reform in the Commons’ or People’s House of Parliament, as shall give to every payer of direct taxes a vote at elections, and as shall cause the Members to be elected annually.

In a late Register I have pointed out how easily, how peaceably, how fairly, such a Parliament might be chosen.  I am aware that it may, and not without justice, be thought wrong to deprive those of the right of voting who pay indirect taxes.  Direct taxes are those which are directly paid by any person into the hands of the tax-gatherers, as the assessed rates and taxes.  Indirect taxes are those which are paid indirectly through the maker or seller of goods, as the tax on soap or candles or salt or malt.  And, as no man ought to be taxed without his consent, there has always been a difficulty upon this head.  There has been no question about the right of every man who is free to exercise his will, who has a settled place in society, and who pays a tax of any sort, to vote for Members of Parliament.  The difficulty is in taking the votes by any other means than by the Rate-book; for if there be no list of tax-payers in the hands of any person, mere menial servants, vagrants, pickpockets, and scamps of all sorts might not only come to the poll, but they might poll in several parishes or places, on one and the same day.  A corrupt rich man might employ scores of persons of this description, and in this way would the purpose of reform be completely defeated.  In America, where one branch of the Congress is elected for four years and the other for two years, they have still adhered to the principle of direct taxation, and in some of the States they have made it necessary for a voter to be worth one hundred pounds.  Yet they have, in that country, duties on goods, custom duties, and excise duties also; and, of course, there are many persons who really pay taxes, and who, nevertheless, are not permitted to vote.  The people do not complain of this.  They know that the number of votes is so great that no corruption can take place, and they have no desire to see livery servants, vagrants, and pickpockets take part in their elections.  Nevertheless it would be very easy for a reformed Parliament, when once it had taken root, to make a just arrangement of this matter.  The most likely method would be to take off the indirect taxes, and to put a small direct tax upon every master of a house, however low his situation in life.

But this and all other good things, must be done by a reformed Parliament.  We must have that first, or we shall have nothing good; and any man who would beforehand take up your time with the detail of what a reformed Parliament ought to do in this respect, or with respect to any changes in the form of government, can have no other object than that of defeating the cause of reform; and, indeed, the very act must show, that to raise obstacles is his wish.

Such men, now that they find you justly irritated, would persuade you that, because things have been perverted from their true ends, there is nothing good in our constitution and laws.  For what, then, did Hampden die in the field, and Sydney on the scaffold?  And has it been discovered at last that England has always been an enslaved country from top to toe?  The Americans, who are a very wise people, and who love liberty with all their hearts, and who take care to enjoy it too, took special care not to part with any of the great principles and laws which they derived from their forefathers.  They took special care to speak with reverence of, and to preserve Magna Charta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, and not only all the body of the Common Law of England, but most of the rules of our courts, and all our form of jurisprudence.  Indeed it is the greatest glory of England that she has thus supplied with sound principles of freedom those immense regions which will be peopled perhaps by hundreds of millions.

I know of no enemy of reform and of the happiness of the country so great as that man who would persuade you that we possess nothing good, and that all must be torn to pieces.  There is no principle, no precedent, no regulations (except as to mere matter of detail), favourable to freedom, which is not to be found in the Laws of England or in the example of our ancestors.  Therefore I say we may ask for, and we want nothing new.  We have great constitutional laws and principles to which we are immovably attached.  We want great alteration, but we want nothing new.  Alteration, modification, to suit the times and circumstances; but the great principles ought to be and must, be the same, or else confusion will follow.

It was the misfortune of the French people that they had no great and settled principles to refer to in their laws or history.  They sallied forth and inflicted vengeance on their oppressors; but, for want of settled principles to which to refer they fell into confusion; they massacred each other; they next flew to a military chief to protect them even against themselves; and the result has been what we too well know.  Let us therefore congratulate ourselves that we have great constitutional principles and laws, to which we can refer, and to which we are attached.

That reform will come I know, if the people do their duty; and all that we have to guard against is confusion, which cannot come if reform take place in time.  I have before observed to you that when the friends of corruption in France saw that they could not prevent a change, they bent their endeavours to produce confusion, in which they fully succeeded.  They employed numbers of unprincipled men to go about the country proposing all sorts of mad schemes.  They produced first a confusion in men’s minds, and next a civil war between provinces, towns, villages and families.  The tyrant Robespierre, who was exceeded in cruelty only by some of the Bourbons, was proved to have been in league with the open enemies of France.  He butchered all the real friends of freedom whom he could lay his hands on, except Paine, whom he shut up in a dungeon till he was reduced to a skeleton.  This monster was at last put to death himself; and his horrid end ought to be a warning to any man who may wish to walk in the same path.  But I am, for my part, in little fear of the influence of such men.  They cannot cajole you as Robespierre cajoled the people of Paris.  It is, nevertheless, necessary for you to be on your guard against them, and when you hear a man talking big and hectoring about projects which go further than a real and radical reform of the Parliament, be you well assured that that man would be a second Robespierre if he could, and that he would make use of you and sacrifice the life of the very last man of you; that he would ride upon the shoulders of some through rivers of the blood of others, for the purpose of gratifying his own selfish and base and insolent ambition.

In order effectually to avoid the rock of confusion, we should keep steadily in our eye not only what we wish to be done but what can be done now.  We know that such a reform as would send up a Parliament, chosen by all payers of direct taxes, is not only just and reasonable, but easy of execution.  I am therefore for accomplishing that object first; and I am not at all afraid that a set of men who would really hold the purse of the people, and who had been just chosen freely by the people, would very soon do everything that the warmest friend of freedom could wish to see done.

While, however, you are upon your guard against false friends, you should neglect no opportunity of doing all that is within your power to give support to the cause of reform.  Petition is the channel for your sentiments, and there is no village so small that its petition would not have some weight.  You ought to attend at every public meeting within your reach.  You ought to read to and to assist, each other in coming at a competent knowledge of all public matters.  Above all things, you ought to be unanimous in your object, and not suffer yourselves to be divided.

The subject of religion has nothing to do with this great question of reform.  A reformed Parliament would soon do away with all religious distinctions and disabilities.  In their eyes, a Catholic and a Protestant would both appear in the same light.

The Courier, the Times, and other emissaries of corruption, are constantly endeavouring to direct your wrath against bakers, brewers, butchers, and other persons who deal in the necessaries of life.  But, I trust that you are not to be stimulated to such a species of violence.  These tradesmen are as much in distress as you.  They cannot help their malt and hops and beer and bread and meat being too dear for you to purchase.  They all sell as cheap as they can, without being absolutely ruined.  The beer you drink is more than half tax, and when the tax has been paid by the seller he must have payment back again from you who drink, or he must be ruined.  The baker has numerous taxes to pay, and so has the butcher, and so has the miller and the farmer.  Besides, all men are eager to sell, and, if they could sell cheaper they certainly would, because that would be the sure way of getting more custom.  It is the weight of the taxes which presses us all to the earth, except those who receive their incomes out of those taxes.  Therefore I exhort you most earnestly not to be induced to lay violent hands on those who really suffer as much as yourselves.

On the subject of lowering wages too, you ought to consider that your employers cannot give to you that which they have not.  At present, corn is high in price, but that high price is no benefit to the farmer, because it has risen from the badness of the crop, which Mr. Hunt foretold at the Common Hall, and for the foretelling of which he was so much abused by the hirelings of the press, who, almost up to this very moment, have been boasting and thanking God for the goodness of the crop!  The farmer whose corn is half destroyed, gains nothing by selling the remaining half for double the price at which he would have sold the whole.  If I grow 10 quarters of wheat, and if I save it all and sell it for two pounds a quarter, I receive as much money as if I had sold the one-half of it for four pounds a quarter.  And I am better off in the former case, because I want wheat for seed, and because I want some to consume myself.  These matters I recommend to your serious consideration; because it being unjust to fall upon your employers to force them to give that which they have not to give, your conduct in such cases must tend to weaken the great cause in which we ought all now to be engaged, namely the removal of our burdens through the means of a reformed Parliament.  It is the interest of vile men of all descriptions to set one part of the people against the other part; and therefore it becomes you to be constantly on your guard against their allurements.

When journeymen find their wages reduced, they should take time to reflect on the real cause, before they fly on their employers, who are in many cases in as great or greater distress than themselves.  How many of those employers have of late gone to jail for debt and left helpless families behind them!  The employer’s trade falls off.  His goods are reduced in price.  His stock loses the half of its value.  He owes money.  He is ruined; and how can he continue to pay high wages?  The cause of his ruin is the weight of the taxes, which presses so heavily on us all, that we lose the power of purchasing goods.  But it is certain that a great many, a very large portion of the farmers, tradesmen, and manufacturers, have, by their supineness and want of public spirit, contributed towards the bringing of this ruin upon themselves and upon you.  They have skulked from their public duty.  They have kept aloof from, or opposed all measures for a redress of grievances; and indeed, they still skulk, though ruin and destruction stare them in the face.  Why do they not now come forward and explain to you the real cause of the reduction of your wages?  Why do they not put themselves at your head in petitioning for redress?  This would secure their property much better than the calling in of troops, which can never afford them more than a short and precarious security.  In the days of their prosperity they were amply warned of what has now come to pass; and the far greater part of them abused and calumniated those who gave them the warning.  Even if they would now act the part of men worthy of being relieved, the relief to us all would speedily follow.  If they will not; if they will still skulk, they will merit all the miseries which they are destined to suffer.

Instead of coming forward to apply for a reduction of those taxes which are pressing them as well as you to the earth, what are they doing?  Why, they are applying to the Government to add to their receipts by passing Corn Bills, by preventing foreign wool from being imported; and many other silly schemes.  Instead of asking for a reduction of taxes they are asking for the means of paying taxes!  Instead of asking for the abolition of sinecure places and pensions, they pray to be enabled to continue to pay the amount of those places and pensions!  They know very well that the salaries of the judges and of many other persons were greatly raised, some years ago, on the ground of the rise in the price of labour and provisions, why then do they not ask to have those salaries reduced, now that labour is reduced?  Why do they not apply to the case of the judges and others the arguments which they apply to you?  They can talk boldly enough to you; but they are too great cowards to talk to the Government, even in the way of petition!  Far more honourable is it to be a ragged pauper than to be numbered among such men.

These people call themselves the respectable part of the nation.  They are, as they pretend, the virtuous part of the people, because they are quiet; as if virtue consisted in immobility!  There is a canting Scotchman in London, who publishes a paper called the ‘Champion’ who is everlastingly harping upon the virtues of the ‘fireside,’ and who inculcates the duty of quiet submission.  Might we ask this Champion of the teapot and milk-jug whether Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights were won by the fireside?  Whether the tyrants of the House of Stuart and of Bourbon were hurled down by fireside virtues?  Whether the Americans gained their independence, and have preserved their freedom, by sitting by the fireside?  O, no! these were all achieved by action, and amidst bustle and noise.  Quiet indeed!  Why in this quality a log, or a stone, far surpasses even the pupils of this Champion of quietness; and the chairs round his fireside exceed those who sit in them.  But in order to put these quiet, fireside, respectable people to the test, let us ask them if they approve of drunkenness, breaches of the peace, black eyes, bloody noses, fraud, bribery, corruption, perjury, and subornation of perjury; and if they say no, let us ask them whether these are not going on all over the country at every general election.  If they answer yes, as they must unless they be guilty of wilful falsehood, will they then be so good as to tell us how they reconcile their inactivity with sentiments of virtue?  Some men, in all former ages, have been held in esteem for their wisdom, their genius, their skill, their valour, their devotion to country, etc., but never until this age, was quietness deemed a quality to be extolled.  It would be no difficult matter to show that the quiet, fireside gentry are the most callous and cruel, and, therefore, the most wicked part of the nation.  Amongst them it is that you find all the peculators, all the blood-suckers of various degrees, all the borough-voters and their offspring, all the selfish and unfeeling wretches, who, rather than risk the disturbing of their ease for one single month, rather than go a mile to hold up their hand at a public meeting, would see half the people perish with hunger and cold.  The humanity, which is continually on their lips, is all fiction.  They weep over the tale of woe in a novel; but round their ‘decent fireside,’ never was compassion felt for a real sufferer, or indignation at the acts of a powerful tyrant.

The object of the efforts of such writers is clearly enough seen.  Keep all quiet!  Do not rouse!  Keep still!  Keep down!  Let those who perish, perish in silence!  It will, however, be out of the power of these quacks, with all their laudanum, to allay the blood which is now boiling in the veins of the people of this kingdom; who, if they are doomed to perish, are at any rate resolved not to perish in silence.  The writer whom I have mentioned above, says that he, of course, does not count ’the lower classes, who, under the pressure of need or under the influence of ignorant prejudice, may blindly and weakly rush upon certain and prompt punishment; but that the security of every decent fireside, every respectable father’s best hopes for his children, still connect themselves with the Government.’  And by Government he clearly means all the mass as it now stands.  There is nobody so callous and so insolent as your sentimental quacks and their patients.  How these ‘decent fireside’ people would stare, if some morning they were to come down and find them occupied by uninvited visitors!  I hope they never will.  I hope that things will never come to this pass:  but if one thing more than any other tends to produce so sad an effect, it is the cool insolence with which such men as this writer treats the most numerous and most suffering classes of the people.

Long as this Address already is, I cannot conclude without some observations on the ‘Charity Subscriptions’ at the London Tavern.  The object of this subscription professes to be to afford relief to the distressed labourers, etc.  About forty thousand pounds have been subscribed, and there is no probability of its going much further.  There is an absurdity on the face of the scheme; for, as all parishes are compelled by law to afford relief to every person in distress, it is very clear that, as far as money is given by these people to relieve the poor, there will be so much saved in the parish rates.  But the folly of the thing is not what I wish you most to attend to.  Several of the subscribers to this fund receive each of them more than ten thousand pounds and some more than thirty thousand pounds each, out of those taxes which you help to pay, and which emoluments not a man of them proposes to give up.  The clergy appear very forward in this subscription.  An Archbishop and a Bishop assisted at the forming of the scheme.  Now then, observe that there has been given out of the taxes, for several years past, one hundred thousand pounds a year, for what, think you?  Why for the relief of the poor clergy!  I have no account at hand later than that delivered last year, and there I find this sum! ­for the poor clergy!  The rich clergy do not pay this sum; but it comes out of those taxes, part, and a large part of which you pay on your beer, malt, salt, shoes, etc.  I daresay that the ’decent firesides’ of these poor clergy still connect themselves with the Government.  Amongst all our misery we have had to support the intolerable disgrace of being an object of the charity of a Bourbon Prince, while we are paying for supporting that family upon the throne of France.  Well!  But is this all?  We are taxed, at the very same moment, for the support of the French Emigrants!  And you shall see to what amount.  Nay, not only French, but Dutch and others, as appears from the forementioned account laid before Parliament last year.  The sum, paid out of the taxes, in one year, for the relief of suffering French Clergy and Laity, St. Domingo Sufferers, Dutch Emigrants, Corsican Emigrants, was one hundred and eighty-seven thousand seven hundred and fifty pounds; yes, one hundred and eighty-seven thousand seven hundred and fifty pounds paid to this set in one year out of those taxes of which you pay so large a share, while you are insulted with a subscription to relieve you, and while there are projectors who have the audacity to recommend schemes for preventing you from marrying while young, and to induce you to emigrate from your country!  I’ll venture my life that the ‘decent firesides’ of all this swarm of French clergy and laity, and Dutch, and Corsicans, and St. Domingo sufferers ’still connect themselves closely with the Government’; and I will also venture my life that you do not stand in need of one more word to warm every drop of blood remaining in your bodies!  As to the money subscribed by regiments of soldiers, whose pay arises from taxes in part paid by you, though it is a most shocking spectacle to behold, I do not think so much of it.  The soldiers are your fathers, brothers, and sons.  But if they were all to give their whole pay, and if they amount to one hundred and fifty thousand men, it would not amount to one-half of what is now paid in Poor-rates, and of course would not add half a pound of bread to every pound which the unhappy paupers now receive.  All the expenses of the Army and Ordnance amount to an enormous sum ­to sixteen or eighteen millions; but the pay of one hundred and fifty thousand men, at a shilling a day each, amounts to no more than two million seven hundred and twelve thousand five hundred pounds.  So that, supposing them all to receive a shilling a day each, the soldiers receive only about a third part of the sum now paid annually in Poor-rates.

I have no room, nor have I any desire, to appeal to your passions upon this occasion.  I have laid before you, with all the clearness I am master of, the causes of our misery, the measures which have led to those causes, and I have pointed out what appears to me to be the only remedy ­namely a reform of the Commons’, or People’s House of Parliament.  I exhort you to proceed in a peaceable and lawful manner, but at the same time to proceed with zeal and resolution in the attainment of this object.  If the skulkers will not join you, if the ‘decent fireside’ gentry still keep aloof, proceed by yourselves.  Any man can draw up a petition, and any man can carry it up to London, with instructions to deliver it into trusty hands, to be presented whenever the House shall meet.  Some further information will be given as to this matter in a future Number.  In the meanwhile, I remain your Friend, WM. COBBETT.

TO JACK HARROW, AN ENGLISH LABOURER

On the new Cheat which is now on foot, and which goes under the name of Savings Banks

NORTH HAMPSTEAD, LONG ISLAND,
November 7th, 1818.

Friend Jack ­You sometimes hear the Parson talk about deceivers, who go about in sheep’s clothing; but who inwardly are ravening wolves.  You frequently hear of the tricks of the London cheats, and I daresay you have often enough witnessed those of mountebanks and gypsies.  But, Jack, all the tricks of these deceivers and cheaters, if the trickery of them all were put together, would fall far short of the trick now playing off under the name of Savings Banks.  And seeing that it is possible that you may be exposed to the danger of having a few pounds picked out of your pocket by this trick, I think it right to put you on your guard against the cheat.

You have before been informed of who and what the Boroughmongers are.  Therefore, at present, I shall enter into no explanation of their recent conduct.  But, in order to give you a clear view of their motives in this new trick, and which, I think, is about the last in their budget, I must go back and tell you something of the history of their Debt, and of what are called the Funds.  Some years ago the Boroughmongers put me into a loathsome prison for two years, made me pay a thousand pounds fine, and made me enter into recognisances for seven years, only because I expressed my indignation at the flogging of Englishmen, in the heart of England, under the superintendence of hired German troops brought into the country to keep the people in awe.  It pleased God, Jack, to preserve my life and health, while I was in that prison.  And I employed a part of my time in writing a little book entitled Paper against Gold.  In this little book I fully explained all the frauds of what is called the National Debt, and of what are called the Funds.  But as it is possible that you may not have seen that little book, I will here tell you enough about these things to make you see the reasons for the Boroughmongers using this trick of Savings Banks.

The Boroughmongers are, you know, those persons (some Lords, some Baronets, and some Esquires, as they call themselves) who fill, or nominate others to fill, the seats in the House of Commons. Commons means the mass of the people.  So that this is the House of the People, according to the law of the land.  The people ­you, I, and all of us, ought to vote for the men who sit in this House.  But the said Lords, Baronets, and Esquires have taken our rights away, and they nominate the Members themselves.  A monger is a dealer, as ironmonger, cheesemonger, and the like:  and as the Lords, Baronets, and Esquires sometimes sell and sometimes buy seats, and as the seats are said to be filled by the people in certain Boroughs, these Lords, Baronets, and Esquires are very properly called Boroughmongers; that is to say, dealers in boroughs or in the seats of boroughs.  As all laws and all other matters of government are set up and enforced at the will of the two Houses, against whose will the king cannot stir hand or foot; and as the Boroughmongers fill the seats of the two Houses, they have all the power, and, of course, the king and the people have none.  Being possessed of all the power; being able to tax us at their pleasure; being able to hang us for whatever they please to call a crime; they will, of course, do with our property and persons just what they please.  And accordingly, they take from us more than the half of our earnings; and they keep soldiers (whom they deceive) to shoot at us and kill us, if we attempt to resist.  They put us in dungeons when they like.  And, in Ireland, they compel people to remain shut up in their houses from sunset to sunrise, and if any man, contrary to their commands, goes out of his house in the night, in order to go to the privy, they punish him very severely; and in that unhappy country they transport men and women to Botany Bay without any trial by jury, and merely by the orders of two justices of the peace appointed by themselves.

This, Jack, is horrid work to be going on amongst a people who call themselves free; amongst a people who boast of their liberties.  But the facts are so; and now I shall explain to you how the Boroughmongers, who are so few in number compared to the whole people, are able to commit these cruel acts and to carry on this abominable tyranny; and you will see that the trick of Savings Banks makes a part of the means, which they now intend to use for the perpetuating of this tyranny.

Formerly, more than a hundred years ago, when the kings of England had some real power, and before the Boroughmongers took all the powers of king and people into their hands, the people, when the kings behaved amiss, used to rise against them and compel them to act justly.  They beheaded Charles the First about one hundred and seventy years ago; and they drove James the Second out of the kingdom; they went so far as to set his family aside for ever, and they put up the present royal family in its stead.

This was all very well; but when King James had been driven out, the Lords and Baronets and Squires conceived the notion of ruling for ever over king and people.  They made Parliaments, which used to be annual, three years of duration; and when the members had been elected for three years, the members themselves made a law to make the people obey them for seven years.  Thus was the usurpation completed; and from that time to this the Boroughmongers have filled the seats just as it has pleased them to do it; and they have, as I said before, done with our property and our persons just what they have pleased to do.

Now it will naturally be matter of wonder to you, friend Jack, that this small band of persons, and of debauched wretched persons too, any half dozen of whom you would be able to beat with one hand tied down; it will be matter of wonder to you that this contemptible band should have been able thus to subjugate, and hold in bondage so degrading, the whole of the English people.  But, Jack, recollect that once a parcel of fat, lazy, drinking, and guttling monks and friars were able to make this same people to work and support them in their laziness and debaucheries, aye, and almost to adore them, too; to go to them, and kneel down and confess their sins to them, and to believe that it was in their power to absolve them of their sins.  Now how was it that these fat, these bastard-propagating rascals succeeded in making the people do this?  Why by fraud; by deception; by cheatery; by making them believe lies; by frightening them half out of their wits; by making them believe that they would go to hell if they did not work for them.  A ten-thousandth part of the people were able to knock the greasy vagabonds on the head; and they would have done it too; but they were afraid of going to hell if they had no priest to pardon them.

Thus did these miscreants govern by fraud.  The Boroughmongers, as I shall by and by show, have of late been compelled to resort to open force; but for a long while they governed by fraud alone.  First they, by the artful and able agents which they have constantly kept in pay, frightened the people with the pretended dangers of a return of the old king’s family.  The people were amused with this scarecrow, while the chains were silently forging to bind them with.  But the great fraud, the cheat of all cheats, was what they call the national debt.  And now, Jack, pray attend to me; for I am going to explain the chief cause of all the disgraces and sufferings of the labourers in England; and am also going to explain the reasons or motives which the Boroughmongers have for setting on foot this new fraud of Savings Banks.  I beg you, Jack, if you have no other leisure time, to stay at home instead of going to church, for one single Sunday.  Shave yourself, put on a clean shirt, and sit down and read this letter ten times over, until you understand every word of it.  And if you do that, you will laugh at the parson and tax-gatherer’s coaxings about Savings Banks.  You will keep your odd pennies to yourself; or lay them out in bread or bacon.

You have heard, I daresay, a great deal about the national debt; and now I will tell you what this thing is, and how it came, and then you will see what an imposture it is, and how shamefully the people of England have been duped and robbed.

The Boroughmongers having usurped all the powers of government, and having begun to pocket the public money at a great rate, the people grew discontented.  They began to think that they had done wrong in driving King James away.  In a pretty little fable-book, there is a fable which says that the frogs, who had a log of wood for king, prayed to Jupiter to send them something more active.  He sent them a stork, or heron, which gobbled them up alive by scores!  The people of England found in the Boroughmongers what the poor frogs found in the stork; and they began to cry out against them and to wish for the old king back again.

The Boroughmongers saw their danger, and they adopted measures to prevent it.  They saw that if they could make it the interest of a great many rich people to uphold them and their system they should be able to get along.  They therefore passed a law to enable themselves to borrow money of rich people; and by the same law they imposed it on the people at large to pay, for ever, the interest of the money so by them borrowed.

The money which they thus borrowed they spent in wars, or divided amongst themselves, in one shape or another.  Indeed the money spent in wars was pocketed, for the greater part, by themselves.  Thus they owed, in time, immense sums of money; and as they continued to pass laws to compel the nation at large to pay the interest of what they borrowed, spent and pocketed, they called and still call this debt, the debt of the nation; or, in the usual words, the national debt.

It is curious to observe that there has seldom been known in the world any very wicked and mischievous scheme of which a priest of some description or other was not at the bottom.  This scheme, certainly as wicked in itself as any that was ever known, and far more mischievous in its consequences than any other, was the offspring of a Bishop of Salisbury, whose name was Burnet; a name that we ought to teach our very children to execrate.  This crafty priest was made a Bishop for his invention of this scheme; a fit reward for such a service.

The Boroughmongers began this debt one hundred and twenty-four years ago.  They have gone on borrowing ever since; and have never paid off one farthing, and never can.  They have continued to pass Acts to make the people pay the interest of what has been borrowed; till, at last, the debt itself amounts to more than all the lands, all the houses, all the trees, all the canals and all the mines would sell for at their full sterling value; and the money to pay the interest is taken out of men’s rents and out of their earnings; and you, Jack, as I shall by and by prove to you, pay to the Boroughmongers more than the half of what you receive in weekly wages from your master.

Is not this a pretty state of things?  Pray observe, Jack, the debt far exceeds the real full value of the whole kingdom, if there could be a purchaser found for it.  So that, you see, as to private property no man has any, as long as this debt hangs upon the country.  Your master, Farmer Gripe, for instance, calls his farm his.  It is none of his, according to the Boroughmongers’ law; for that law has pawned it for the payment of the interest of the Boroughmongers’ debt; and the pawn must remain as long as the Boroughmongers’ law remains.  Gripe is compelled to pay out of the yearly value of his farm a certain portion to the debt.  He may, indeed, sell the farm; but he can get only a part of the value; because the purchaser will have to pay a yearly sum on account of the pawn.  In short, the Boroughmongers have, in fact, passed laws to take every man’s private property away from him, in whatever portions their debt may demand such taking away; and a man who thinks himself an owner of land, is at best only a steward who manages it for the Boroughmongers.

This, however, is only a small part of the evil; for the whole of the rents of the houses and lands and mines and canals would not pay the interest of this debt; no, and not much more than the half of it.  The labour is therefore pawned too.  Every man’s labour is pawned for the payment of the interest of this debt.  Aye, Jack, you may think that you are working for yourself, and that, when on a Saturday night you take nine shillings from Farmer Gripe, the shillings are for your own use.  You are grievously deceived, for more than half the sum is paid to the Boroughmongers on account of the pawn.  You do not see this, but the fact is so.  Come, what are the things in which you expend the nine shillings?  Tea, sugar, tobacco, candles, salt, soap, shoes, beer, bread; for no meat do you ever taste.  On the articles taken together, except bread, you pay far more than half tax; and you will observe that your master’s taxes are, in part, pinched out of you.  There is an army employed in Ireland to go with the excisemen and other taxers to make the people pay.  If the taxers were to wait at the ale houses and grocers’ shops, and receive their portion from your own hands, you would then clearly see that the Boroughmongers take away more than the half of what you earn.  You would then clearly see what it is that makes you poor and ragged, and that makes your children cry for the want of a bellyful.  You would clearly see that what the hypocrites tell you about this being your lot, and about Providence placing you in such a state in order to try your patience and faith, is all a base falsehood.  Why does not Providence place the Boroughmongers and the parsons in a state to try their patience and faith?  Is Providence less anxious to save them than to save you?  If you could see clearly what you pay on account of the Boroughmongers’ pawn, you would see that your misery arises from the designs of a benevolent Providence being counteracted by the measures of the Borough-tyrants.

Your lot, indeed!  Your lot assigned by Providence!  This is real blasphemy!  Just as if Providence, which sends the salt on shore all round our coast, had ordained that you should not have any of it unless you would pay the Boroughmongers fifteen shillings a bushel tax upon it!  But what a Providence must that be which would ordain that an Englishman should pay fifteen shillings tax on a bushel of English salt, while a Long Islander pays only two shillings and sixpence for a bushel of the same salt, after it is brought to America from England?  What an idea must we have of such a Providence as this?  Oh no, Jack; this is not the work of Providence.  It is the work of the Boroughmongers; the pretext about Providence has been invented to deceive and cheat you, and to perpetuate your slavery.

Well:  all is pawned then.  The land, the houses, the canals, the mines, and the labour are pawned for the payment of the interest of the Boroughmongers debt.  Your labour, mind, Jack, is pawned for the one-half of its worth.  But you will naturally ask, how is it that the nation, that everybody submits to this?  There’s your mistake, Jack.  It is not everybody that submits.  In the first place there are the Boroughmongers themselves and all their long tribe of relations, legitimate and spurious, who profit from the taxes, and who have the church livings, which they enjoy without giving the poor any part of their legal share of those livings.  Then there are all the officers of army and navy, and all the endless hosts of place-men and place-women, pensioned men and pensioned women, and all the hosts of tax-gatherers, who alone, these last I mean, swallow more than would be necessary to carry on the Government under a reformed Parliament.  But have you forgotten the lenders of the money which makes the debt?  These people live wholly upon the interest of the debt; and of course they approve of your labour, and the labour of every man being pawned.  The Boroughmongers have pawned your labour to them.  Therefore they like that your labour should be taxed.  They cannot be said to submit to the tyranny; they applaud it, and to their utmost they support it.

But you will say, still the mass of the people would, if they had a mind to bestir themselves, be too strong for all these.  Very true.  But you forget the army, Jack.  This is a great military force, armed with bayonets, bullets and cannon-balls, ready at all times and in all places to march or gallop to attack the people, if they attempt to eat sugar or salt without paying the tax.  There are forts, under the name of barracks, all over the kingdom, where armed men are kept in readiness for this purpose.  In Ireland they actually go in person to help to collect the taxes; and in England they are always ready to do the same.  Now, suppose, Jack, that a man who has a bit of land by the seaside, were to take up a little of the salt that Providence sends on shore.  He would be prosecuted.  He would resist the process.  Soldiers would come and take him away to be tried and hanged.  Suppose you, Jack, were to dip your rushes into grease, till they came to farthing candles.  The Excise would prosecute you.  The sheriff would send men to drag you to jail.  You would fight in defence of your house and home.  You would beat off the sheriff’s men.  Soldiers would come and kill you, or would take you away to be hanged.

This is the thing by which the Boroughmongers govern.  There are enough who would gladly not submit to their tyranny; but there is nobody but themselves who has an army at command.

Nevertheless they are not altogether easy under these circumstances.  An army is a two-edged weapon.  It may cut the employer as well as the thing that it is employed upon.  It is made up of flesh and blood, and of English flesh and blood too.  It may not always be willing to move, or to strike when moved.  The Boroughmongers see that their titles and estates hang upon the army.  They would fain coax the people back again to feelings of reverence and love.  They would fain wheedle them into something that shall blunt their hostility.  They have been trying Bible-schemes, school-schemes, and soup-schemes.  And at last they are trying the Savings Banks scheme, upon which I shall now more particularly address you.

This thing is of the same nature, and its design is the same, as those of the grand scheme of Bishop Burnet.  The people are discontented.  They feel their oppressions; they seek a change; and some of them have decidedly protested against paying any longer any part of the interest of the debt, which they say ought to be paid, if at all, by those who have borrowed and spent, or pocketed, the money.  Now then, in order to enlist great numbers of labourers and artisans on their side, the Boroughmongers have fallen upon the scheme of coaxing them to put small sums into what they call banks.  These sums they pay large interest upon, and suffer the parties to take them out whenever they please.  By this scheme they think to bind great numbers to them and their tyranny.  They think that great numbers of labourers and artisans, seeing their little sums increase, as they will imagine, will begin to conceive the hopes of becoming rich by such means; and as these persons are to be told that their money is in the funds, they will soon imbibe the spirit of fundholders, and will not care who suffers, or whether freedom or slavery prevail, so that the funds be but safe.

Such is the scheme and such the motives.  It will fail of its object, though not unworthy the inventive powers of the servile knaves of Edinburgh.  It will fail, first because the men from whom alone the Borough-tyrants have anything to dread, will see through the scheme and despise it; and will, besides, well know that the funds are a mere bubble that may burst, or be bursted at any moment.  The parsons appear to be the main tools in this coaxing scheme.  They are always at the head of everything which they think likely to support tyranny.  The depositors will be domestic servants, particularly women, who will be tickled with the idea of having a fortune in the funds.  The Boroughmongers will hint to their tenants that they must get their labourers into the Savings Banks.  A preference will be given to such as deposit.  The Ladies, the ‘Parsons’ Ladies,’ will scold poor people into the funds.  The parish officers will act their part in this compulsory process:  and thus will the Boroughmongers get into their hands some millions of the people’s money by a sort of ‘forced loan’:  or in other words, a robbery.  In order to swell the thing out, the parsons and other tools of the Boroughmongers will lend money in this way themselves, under feigned names; and we shall, if the system last a year or two, hear boastings of how rich the poor are become.

Now then, Jack, supposing it possible that Farmer Gripe may, under pain of being turned out of your cottage, have made you put your twopence a week into one of these banks, let us see what is the natural consequence of your so doing.  Twopence a week is eight shillings and eightpence a year; and the interest will make the amount about nine shillings perhaps.  What use is this to you?  Will you let it remain; and will you go on thus for years?  You must go on a great many years, indeed, before your deposit amounts to as much as the Boroughmongers take from you in one year!  Twopence will buy you a quarter of a pound of meat.  This is a dinner for your wife or yourself.  You never taste meat.  And why are you to give up half a pound of your bread to the Boroughmongers.  You are ill; your wife is ill; your children are ill.  ‘Go to the bank and take out your money,’ says the overseer; ‘for I’ll give you no aid till that be spent.’  Thus then, you will have been robbing your own starved belly weekly, to no other end than that of favouring the parish purse, upon which you have a just and legal claim, until the clergy restore to the poor what they have taken from them.  As the thing now stands, the poor are starved by others, this scheme is intended to make them assist in the work themselves, at the same time that it binds them to the tyranny.

But, Jack, what a monstrous thing is this, that the Boroughmongers should kindly pass an Act to induce you to save your money, while they take from you five shillings out of every nine that you earn?  Why not take less from you!  That would be the more natural way to go to work, surely.  Why not leave you all your earnings to yourself?  Oh, no!  They cannot do that.  It is from the labour of men like you that the far greater part of the money comes to enrich the Boroughmongers, their relations and dependants.

However, suppose you have gotten together five pounds in a Savings Bank.  That is to say in the funds.  This is a great deal for you, though it is not half so much as you are compelled to give to the Boroughmongers in one year.  This is a great sum.  It is much more than you ever will have; but suppose you have it.  It is in the funds, mind.  And now let me tell you what the funds are; which is necessary if you have not read my little book called Paper against Gold. The funds is no place at all, Jack.  It is nothing, Jack.  It is moonshine.  It is a lie, a bubble, a fraud, a cheat, a humbug.  And it is all these in the most perfect degree.  People think that the funds is a place where money is kept.  They think that it is a place which contains that which they have deposited.  But the fact is, that the funds is a word which means nothing that the most of the people think it means.  It means the descriptions of the several sorts of the debt.  Suppose I owed money to a tailor, to a smith, to a shoemaker, to a carpenter, and that I had their several bills in my house.  I should in the language of the Boroughmongers, call these bills my funds.  The Boroughmongers owe some people annuities at three pounds for a hundred; some at four pounds for a hundred; some at five pounds for a hundred; and these annuities, or debts they call their funds.  And, Jack, if the Savings Bank people lend them a good parcel of money, they will have that money in these debts or funds.  They will be owners of some of those debts which never will and never can be paid.

But what is this money too in which you are to be paid back again?  It is no money.  It is paper; and though that paper will pass just at this time; it will not long pass, I can assure you, Jack.  When you have worked a fortnight, and get a pound note for it, you set a high value upon the note, because it brings you food.  But suppose nobody would take the note from you.  Suppose no one would give you anything in exchange for it.  You would go back to Farmer Gripe and fling the note in his face.  You would insist upon real money, and you would get it, or you would tear down his house.  This is what will happen, Jack, in a very short time.

I will explain to you, Jack, how this matter stands.  Formerly bank-notes were as good as real money, because anybody that had one might go at any moment, and get real money for it at the Bank.  But now the thing is quite changed.  The Bank broke some years ago; that is to say, it could not pay its notes in real money; and it never has been able to do it from that time to this; and what is more, it never can do it again.  To be sure the paper passes at present.  You take it for your work, and others take it of you for bread and tea.  But the time may be, and I believe is, very near at hand, when this paper will not pass at all; and then as the Boroughmongers and the Savings Bank people have, and can have, no real money, how are you to get your five pounds back again?

The bank-notes may be all put down at any moment, if any man of talent and resolution choose to put them down; and why may not such a man exist, and have the Disposition to put them down?  They are now of value, as I said before, because they will pass; because people will take them and will give victuals and drink for them; but, if nobody would give bread and tea and beer for them, would they then be good for anything?  They are taken because people are pretty sure that they can pass them again; but who will take them when he does not think that he can pass them again?  And I assure you, Jack, that even I myself could, before next May-day, do that which would prevent any man in England from ever taking a bank-note any more.  If you should put five pounds into a Savings Bank, therefore, you could, in such case, never see a farthing in exchange for it.

This being a matter of so much importance to you, I will clearly explain to you how I might easily do the thing.  Mind, I do not say that I will do the thing.  Indeed, I will not; and I do not know any one that intends to do it.  But I will show you how I might do it; because it is right that you should know what a ticklish state your poor five pounds will be in if you deposit them in the Savings Bank.

You know, Jack, that forged notes pass till people find them out.  They keep passing very quietly till they come to the Bank, and there being known for forged notes, the man who carries them to the Bank, or owns them at the time, loses the amount of them.  Suppose now, that Tom were to forge a note, and pay it to Dick for a pig.  Dick would pay it to Bob for some tea.  Bob would send it up to London to pay his tea-man.  The tea-man would send it to the Bank.  The Bank would keep it, and give him nothing for it.  If the tea-man forgot whom he got it from, he must lose.  If he could prove that he got it from Bob, Bob must lose it; and so on; but either Dick or Bob or the tea-man must lose it.  There must be a loss somewhere.

Now, it is clear that if there were a great quantity of forged notes in circulation, people would be afraid to take notes at all; and that if this great quantity came out all of a sudden, it would for a while put an end to all payments and all trade.  And if such great quantity can with safety be put out, I leave you to guess, Jack, at the situation of your five pounds.  I will now show you, then, that I could do this myself, and with perfect safety and ease.

I could have made, at a very trifling expense, a million of pounds in bank-notes of various amounts.  There are fourteen different ways in which I could send them to England, and lodge them safely there, without the smallest chance of their arrival being known to any soul except the man to whom they should be confided.  The Banks might search and ransack every vessel that arrived from America.  They might do what they would.  They would never detect the cargo!

There they are then, safe in London; a famous stock of bank-notes, so well executed that no human being except the Bank people would be able to discover the counterfeit.  The agent takes a parcel at a time, and drops them in the street in the dark.  This work he carries on for a week or two in such streets as are best calculated for the purpose, till he has well stocked the town.  He may do the same at Portsmouth and other great towns if he please, and he may send off large supplies by post.

Now, Jack, suppose you were up at London with your master’s waggon.  You might find a parcel of notes.  You would go to the first shop to buy your wife a gown and your children some clothes, yourself a hat, a greatcoat, and some shoes.  The rest you would lay out at shops on the road home; for the sooner you got rid of this foundal, the less chance of having it taken from you.  The shopkeepers would thank you for your custom, and your wife’s heart would bound with joy.

The notes would travel about most merrily.  At last they would come to the Bank.  The holders would lose them; but you would gain by them.  So that, upon the whole, there would be no loss, and the maker of the notes would have no gain.  Others would find, and nearly all would do like you.  In a few days the notes would find their way to the Bank in great numbers, where they would all be stopped.  The news would spread abroad.  The thieftakers would be busy.  Every man who had had his note stopped at the Bank would alarm his neighbourhood.  The country would ring with the news.  Nobody would take a bank-note.  All business would be at a stand.  The farmers would sell no corn for bank-notes.  The millers would have nothing else to pay with.  No markets, because no money.  The baker would be able to get no flour.  He could sell no bread, for nobody would have money to pay him.

Jack, this thing will assuredly take place.  Mind, I tell you so.  I have been right in my predictions on former occasions; and I am not wrong now.  I beg you to believe me; or, at any rate, to blame yourself if you lose by such an event.  In the midst of this hubbub what will you do?  Farmer Gripe will, I daresay, give you something to eat for your labour.  But what will become of your five pounds?  That sum you have in the Savings Bank, and as you are to have it out at any time when you please, your wife sets off to draw it.  The banker gives her a five-pound note.  She brings it; but nobody will take it of you for a pig, for bread, for clothing, or for anything else!  And this, Jack, will be the fate of all those who shall be weak enough to put their money into those banks!

I beg you, Jack, not to rely on the power of the Boroughmongers in this case.  Anything that is to be done with halters, gags, dungeons, bayonets, powder, or ball, they can do a great deal at; but they are not conjurers; they are not wizards.  They cannot prevent a man from dropping bank-notes in the dark; and they cannot make people believe in the goodness of that which they must know to be bad.  If they could hold a sword to every man’s breast, they might indeed do something; but short of this, nothing that they can do would be of any avail.  However, the truth is that they, in such case, will have no sword at all.  An army is a powerful weapon; but an army must be paid.  Soldiers have been called machines; but they are eating and drinking machines.  With good food and drink they will go far and do much; but without them, they will not stir an inch.  And in such a case whence is to come the money to pay them?  In short, Jack, the Boroughmongers would drop down dead, like men in an apoplexy, and you would, as soon as things got to rights, have your bread and beer and meat and everything in abundance.

The Boroughmongers possess no means of preventing the complete success of the dropping plan.  If they do, they ought to thank me for giving them a warning of their danger; and for telling them that if they do prevent the success of such a plan, they are the cleverest fellows in this world.

I now, Jack, take my leave of you, hoping that you will not be coaxed out of your money, and assuring you that I am your friend,

WM. COBBETT.