and, since 1832, member of Parliament for Oldham. Cobbett had been almost alone in his opposition to the Poor Law Amendment Bill in Parliament, and soon after it became law he published his views upon it in his Legacy to Labourers. This little book is an excellent example of Cobbett's controversial gifts. Its arguments are as clear and telling as its style. Its bold assumptions and sweeping assertions, as well as its grotesque errors of fact (Cobbett alleges that the population of England had not increased during the previous half-century), are all characteristic of this unparalleled controversialist, and furnished ammunition of which his even more uncritical followers made unsparing use.
The Legacy must be read in connection with Cobbett's admirable but rather perverse History of the Reformation. The two together form a strong plea for regarding poor relief as a legally recognised commutation of the rights of the poor in the land. The seizure of the lands of the Church which, he maintained with some truth, were granted for charitable purposes (an argument applied over and over again by his followers to justify the disendowment of the Anglican Church) was followed by the provisions regarding relief of the poor on which the famous Act of 1601 was based. This Act, Cobbett argued, recognised the legal right of the poor to assistance from the receivers of rent. The Act of 1834, a "Bourbon invention," repealed this right and destroyed it without compensation. This was the main contention, and it formed the theme of most of the speeches delivered by Anti-Poor Law orators. Thus O'Connor at Dewsbury in December 1837: "Had you any voice in the passing of this law? … Did you send representatives to Parliament, thus to betray you and rob you of your inheritance?"[1]
Cobbett's argument goes further than this. On what ground, he asks, was this legal right abrogated? On the ground that poor rates were swallowing up the estates of the landlords. This was in fact absurd. Are the landlords ruined by the poor, to whom they pay £6,700,000, when they pay thirty millions to usurers[2] and seven to "sinecurists"? Was the country being ruined for a paltry seven millions when the taxation paid was fifty-two millions? And, further, even suppose the landlords were paying more, was it not a fact that they were receiving ten or twenty times as much rent as they
- ↑ G. R. W. Baxter, The Book of the Bastiles, p. 392.
- ↑ I.e. National Debt interest.
