ust
destroy the debt, or the debt will destroy the nation,' as he argued
in the _Register_.[184] The proposal very likely caused the alienation
of a respectable minister, though propounded with an amusing air of
philosophical morality. Cobbett's alarm developed until it became to
him a revelation of the mystery of iniquity. His Radical friends were
denouncing placemen and jobbery, and Cobbett began to perceive what
was at the bottom of the evil. The money raised to carry on the war
served also to support a set of bloodsuckers, who were draining the
national strength. Already, in 1804, he was lamenting a change due to
Pitt's funding system. The old families, he said, were giving way to
'loanjobbers, contractors, and nabobs'; and the country people amazed
to find that their new masters had been 'butchers, bakers,
bottle-corkers, and old-clothesmen.'[185] Barings and Ricardos and
their like were swallowing up the old country gentry wholesale; and in
later years he reckons up, as he rides, the changes in his own
neighbourhood.[186] His affection for the old country-gentleman might
be superficial; but his lamentations over the degradation of the
peasantry sprang from his heart. It was all, in his eyes, part of one
process. Paper money, he found out, was at the bottom of it all; for
paper money was the outward and visible symbol of a gigantic system of
corruption and jobbery. It represented the device by which the
hard-earned wages of the labourer were being somehow conjured away
into the pockets of Jews and stockjobbers. The classes which profited
by this atrocious system formed what he called the 'Thing'--the huge,
intricate combination of knaves which was being denounced by the
Radicals--though with a difference. Cobbett could join the reformers
in so far as, like them, he thought that the rotten boroughs were a
vital part of the system. He meets a miserable labourer complaining of
the 'hard times.' The harvest had been good, but its blessings were
not for the labourer. That 'accursed hill,' says Cobbett, pointing to
old Sarum, 'is what has robbed you of your supper.'[187] The labourer
represented the class whose blood was being sucked.

So far, then, as the Radicals were assailing the borough-mongers,
Cobbett could be their cordial ally. Two years' imprisonment for libel
embittered his feelings. In the distress which succeeded the peace,
Cobbett's voice was for a time loudest in the general hubbub. He
reduced the price o