Cobbett and Mill. 477 



day was cold, too, and frost hardly off the ground, and their 

 blue arms and lips would have made any heart ache but that 

 of a seat seller or loan jobber." He rides on into the village, 

 values at a thousand pounds the whole collection of buildings, 

 including a " thing " (the Town Hall) standing out in the 

 middle, and alights in the yard of the inn. Here he learns 

 from the ostler the name of the place, and breaks out into 

 a tirade against Parliamentary representation, on finding that 

 it returns two members to the House of Commons, Asking 

 the inn servant the names of these worthies, he is maliciously 

 pleased to hear that they are so seldom there as to be practi- 

 cally unknown. Before leaving the neighbourhood, he notes 

 the impoverished circumstances of those who, if he could have 

 his way, should be their electors. " Their dwellings," he says, 

 " are little better than pig-beds, and their looks indicate that 

 their food is not nearly equal to that of a pig. Their wretched 

 hovels are stuck upon little bits of ground on the roadside, 

 where the space has been wider than the road demanded. It 

 seems as if they have been swept off the fields by a hurricane, 

 and had dropped and found shelter under the banks of the 

 roadside. In my whole life," he adds, "I never saw human 

 wretchedness equal to this; no, not even amongst the free 

 negroes of America, who on an average do not work one day 

 out of four. And this is prosperity, is it? These, oh Pitt, 

 are the fruits of thy hellish system ! " Something that John 

 Bennett, M.P., had said about the gallon loaf being a suffi- 

 ciency for the maintenance of farm labourers, was at the 

 source of this outburst, for further on, he talks of Wiltshire 

 as " the horrible county of the gallon loaf." 



But Cobbett did not content himself with taking silent 

 notes at the time, and publishing his antagonistic views later 

 on ; he struck, wherever he could, while the iron was hot. He 

 was let loose on rural society, just when the agricultural dis- 

 tress was at its height. From 1821 to 1832 he was traversing 

 the country on horseback, chattering to the labourers at work, 

 addressing the farmers at the market ordinaries, and exam- 

 ining into the prices of produce, wages of labour, and rents of 

 land. Amidst the prevailing discontent, a far less powerful 



