lish
soldiers by German mercenaries. In that savage dispersal of a peaceful
meeting which was called the Massacre of Peterloo, English soldiers were
indeed employed, though much more in the spirit of German ones. And it
is one of the bitter satires that cling to the very continuity of our
history, that such suppression of the old yeoman spirit was the work of
soldiers who still bore the title of the Yeomanry.

The name of Cobbett is very important here; indeed it is generally
ignored because it is important. Cobbett was the one man who saw the
tendency of the time as a whole, and challenged it as a whole;
consequently he went without support. It is a mark of our whole modern
history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet
by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this
time that the Party System has been popular only in the same sense that
a football match is popular. The division in Cobbett's time was slightly
more sincere, but almost as superficial; it was a difference of
sentiment about externals which divided the old agricultural gentry of
the eighteenth century from the new mercantile gentry of the
nineteenth. Through the first half of the nineteenth century there were
some real disputes between the squire and the merchant. The merchant
became converted to the important economic thesis of Free Trade, and
accused the squire of starving the poor by dear bread to keep up his
agrarian privilege. Later the squire retorted not ineffectively by
accusing the merchant of brutalizing the poor by overworking them in his
factories to keep up his commercial success. The passing of the Factory
Acts was a confession of the cruelty that underlay the new industrial
experiments, just as the Repeal of the Corn Laws was a confession of the
comparative weakness and unpopularity of the squires, who had destroyed
the last remnants of any peasantry that might have defended the field
against the factory. These relatively real disputes would bring us to
the middle of the Victorian era. But long before the beginning of the
Victorian era, Cobbett had seen and said that the disputes were only
relatively real. Or rather he would have said, in his more robust
fashion, that they were not real at all. He would have said that the
agricultural pot and the industrial kettle were calling each other
black, when they had both been blackened in the same kitchen. And he
would have been substantially right; fo