times were critical. Colonel Despard and his associates had been executed early in the year for conspiring against the King and the Government. Bonaparte was busy preparing for an invasion of either England or Ireland, probably the latter, for he was well aware that its population was desperate with discontent. Cobbett's views with reference to the Catholics were, no doubt, well known, and had already caused the Government to regard him as more likely to prove their enemy than their ally. It was determined, therefore, to indict him for libel. He was convicted, and fined £500. Another prosecution was then commenced by Mr Plunkett, the Irish Attorney-General. Cobbett was again convicted, and fined an additional £500.
His early impressions, his rural sympathies, his enthusiastic patriotism, his military education, and his six months' stay in revolutionary France, had sent Cobbett to America a Tory of the most extreme type; but his eight years' residence there had prepared his mind for very different views.
He had not only to read much said on the other side, but his own eyes constantly bore witness to him of the vast contrast between the condition and prospects of the mass of the community in America to what he had known it in England. Describing a few years earlier the very district in which Cobbett had resided, Dr Franklin wrote:—"The lands (the farmer) possesses are continually rising in value with the increase of population; and, on the whole, he is enabled to give such good wages to those who work for him, that all who are acquainted with the Old World must agree that in no part are the labouring poor so generally well fed, well [clothed, well lodged, and well paid, as in the United States of America." A happy mediocrity in wealth prevailed everywhere; there were few rich men, and hardly one who could be called very poor. The hard-working cultivator of the soil worked, as a rule, for himself, and was able to support his family in decent plenty. In the cities the workmen all had higher wages than in any other part of the world, and were paid moreover] in ready money. Cobbett himself, therefore, in spite of all his horror for democratic institutions, was compelled to share Franklin's conviction, that, as far as material well-being went, "no nation enjoyed a greater share of human felicity."
