biographies you will learn that he was a Radical who had once been a
Tory. From his life, if there were one, you would learn that he was
always a Radical because he was always a Tory. Few men changed less; it
was round him that the politicians like Pitt chopped and changed, like
fakirs dancing round a sacred rock. His secret is buried with him; it is
that he really cared about the English people. He was conservative
because he cared for their past, and liberal because he cared for their
future. But he was much more than this. He had two forms of moral
manhood very rare in our time: he was ready to uproot ancient successes,
and he was ready to defy oncoming doom. Burke said that few are the
partisans of a tyranny that has departed: he might have added that fewer
still are the critics of a tyranny that has remained. Burke certainly
was not one of them. While lashing himself into a lunacy against the
French Revolution, which only very incidentally destroyed the property
of the rich, he never criticised (to do him justice, perhaps never saw)
the English Revolution, which began with the sack of convents, and ended
with the fencing in of enclosures; a revolution which sweepingly and
systematically destroyed the property of the poor. While rhetorically
putting the Englishman in a castle, politically he would not allow him
on a common. Cobbett, a much more historical thinker, saw the beginning
of Capitalism in the Tudor pillage and deplored it; he saw the triumph
of Capitalism in the industrial cities and defied it. The paradox he was
maintaining really amounted to the assertion that Westminster Abbey is
rather more national than Welbeck Abbey. The same paradox would have led
him to maintain that a Warwickshire man had more reason to be proud of
Stratford-on-Avon than of Birmingham. He would no more have thought of
looking for England in Birmingham than of looking for Ireland in
Belfast.

The prestige of Cobbett's excellent literary style has survived the