WILLIAM COBBETT.
Everybody appeals to common-sense, but what is common-sense? It is
a question difficult to answer; and yet, as I propose to show that
Cobbett’s opposition to vaccination was justified by common-sense,
I am bound to give some definition of the term.
Common-sense is reason as evolved from common experience. What
the multitude of men have found to be true in the course of
life, that is common-sense, which to question or resist is folly
or fanaticism. This vulgar and vigorous rationality is often
summoned to service where it has no vocation. For example, when
it was first taught that the earth was a sphere and that its
inhabitants had antipodes, the revelation was denounced as contrary
to common-sense; but it is obvious that in such a case (which
represents myriads) it was wrongly invoked; the form of the earth
being at the time outside common cognisance. As soon, however,
as it was realised by experience that the earth was spherical
and inhabited in all its quarters, then its rotundity became
incorporated in the constitution of common-sense.
The realm of common-sense I therefore hold to be limited by its
origin in common experience, and in matters above or beyond
that experience, its dicta are illegitimate, and synonyms for
presumption and prejudice.
William Cobbett was essentially a man of common-sense. His power
lay in his community with the experience and reason of his
countrymen; and, like all of us, he had the defects of his virtue.
He continually applied his vulgar judgment to the criticism of men
and matters beyond the range of his competence, and the result was
a luxuriance of arrogance and contempt for which at this day we
must resort to Mr. Ruskin for a parallel.
Such being the case, we have to inquire, What was the worth of
Cobbett’s opinion in the matter of vaccination? The attempt
is sometimes made by vaccinators to withdraw their practice
from popular discussion. They say it is a medical question for
medical men; but the assertion provokes suspicion rather than
confidence, for mystery is an invariable note of imposture. It
is fair, I allow, to say of any abstruse knowledge that it can
only be apprehended by those whose faculties are trained for its
apprehension; but what is there abstruse about vaccination? With
little trouble, everybody may know as much about it as anybody.
It is the simplest of surgical operations. It is almost as easy
as taking pills--instead of putting poison down the throat it is
inserted into the skin. The operation may result in any number of
pathological complications, but whether such complications be
admitted or denied, what vaccination is prescribed for, namely,
the prevention of smallpox, comes within the range of common
observation. What, therefore, I have to answer is, that Cobbett’s
common-sense was competent to deliver judgment upon vaccination.
Moreover, the circumstances of the time compelled an opinion:
silence or neutrality was impossible. England was swarming with
vaccinators. All the fussy folk who had a taste for doing much good
at little cost were plying the cowpox lancet. Encouraged by Jenner,
they got vaccine, inoculated a victim, and propagated the virus
from arm to arm. Here I may let Cobbett speak for himself--
This nation is fond of quackery of all sorts; and this particular
quackery having been sanctioned by King, Lords, and Commons, it
spread over the country like a pestilence borne by the winds.
Speedily sprang up the Royal Jennerian Institution, and branch
institutions issuing from the parent trunk, set instantly to
work, impregnating the veins of the rising generation with the
beastly matter. Gentlemen and ladies made the commodity a pocket
companion; and if a cottager’s child was seen by them on a common
(in Hampshire at least) and did not quickly take to its heels, it
was certain to carry off more or less of the disease of the cow.
One would have thought that half the cows in the country had been
tapped to get such a quantity of stuff.[180]
Nor was vaccination merely forced on Cobbett’s attention as a
popular craze. He had to deal with it as a possible compulsory
infliction. At a public meeting in 1803, Wilberforce and Dr.
Clarke advocated the prohibition of smallpox inoculation and the
enforcement of vaccination; and Cobbett, in a letter addressed to
Wilberforce, rebuked the arbitrary project in a strain impressive
and dignified as that of Burke himself. He wrote--
It seems there are prejudices against cowpox which it is
necessary to destroy by force. That there are prejudices, and
very strong ones too, I am ready to allow, but I cannot agree
that these prejudices should be eradicated by force; nor is it
perhaps fair to use the degrading term as expressive of the
dislike which so large a portion of the community entertain to
the practice you are so anxious to compel them to adopt. The
charge of prejudice has been preferred but too often, and with
but too fatal success against every one opposed to change. The
truth is that whoever has been found to object to innovation,
however wild in itself, however destructive in its consequences,
has constantly been accused of prejudice; and as prejudice thus
used implies a mixture of _ignorance_ and _perverseness_, and as
few persons are willing to be thought ignorant and perverse, the
imputation is employed to coerce assent where reason hesitates.
He then aptly applied the repudiated recommendation of inoculation
with smallpox as cause for hesitation in assenting to inoculation
with cowpox--
There was, you must well remember, a strong and general
objection, which for a long time prevailed, against Inoculation
with Smallpox; and you cannot have forgotten that this objection
was termed _prejudice_, and the persons entertaining it were
regarded as _illiterate_, _ignorant_, or _perverse_; yet it now
appears from the Address of your Royal Jennerian Society that
it would have been well for the human race if the prejudices of
those illiterate, ignorant, or perverse persons had universally
obtained; for you now tell us that “Inoculation by spreading the
contagion has considerably increased the mortality of Smallpox.”
With an example like this before our eyes, Ought we not to be
very cautious how we adopt your new system of Inoculation with
Cowpox?
Then turning upon Wilberforce in his favourite character of
constitutional Englishman, he proceeded--
Give me leave to ask you, Sir, how you reconcile a proposition to
enforce this novel practice with the spirit of that Constitution
of which you profess to be so great an admirer, and with that
freedom of which you wish to be regarded as one of the principal
supporters? What I am opposed to, and what I am alarmed at, is
the proposition to obtain an Act of Parliament which would in its
operation be nothing short of compulsion on every man to suffer
the veins of his child to be impregnated with the disease of a
beast--a measure to be adopted in no country where the people are
not vassals or slaves.
Lastly came these remarks which at this day have force and
application greater even than when written--
I like not this never-ending recurrence to Acts of Parliament.
Something must be left, and something _ought_ to be left, to the
sense and reason and morality and religion of the people. There
are a set of _well-meaning men_ in this country, who would pass
laws for the regulating and restraining of every feeling of the
human breast, and every motion of the human frame: they would
bind us down, hair by hair, as the Liliputians did Gulliver, till
anon, when we awoke from our sleep, we should wonder by whom we
had been enslaved. But I trust, Sir, that Parliament is not, and
never will be, so far under the influence of these minute and
meddling politicians as to be induced to pass laws for taking out
of a man’s hands the management of his household, the choice of
his physician, and the care of the health of his children; for,
under this sort of domiciliary thraldom, to talk of the liberty
of the country would be the most cruel mockery wherewith an
humble and subjected people were ever insulted.[181]
Cobbett, be it observed, thus addressed Wilberforce in 1803, when
vaccination was as yet imperfectly tested, and its advocates
were in the full blast of enthusiastic persuasion that to be
Jennerised was to be made proof against smallpox for ever. When
Cobbett had again occasion to write about cowpox, six years had
passed away, bearing with them the phantastic certainty with which
vaccination had been imposed upon public credulity. Nevertheless
the practice was not abandoned: quackery once alive and lucrative,
dies hard: but it was discredited, and its apologists exercised
their ingenuity in devising explanations and excuses for its
manifest failures. The Royal Jennerian Society had split between
Jenner and Walker, and application to Parliament was resolved
upon for two purposes--first, to save Jenner from poverty; and
second, to provide funds for the maintenance of vaccination,
voluntary subscriptions having fallen off irretrievably. In short,
vaccination had broken down, and the House of Commons was called
upon to save it from extinction. There were wire-pullers in the
House and out of the House who were compromised by their patronage
of Jenner and his imposture, and they had the craft and the power
to transfer the responsibility of which they were sick to the
national exchequer. With this explanation, we shall understand the
following article from the _Register_ of 18th June, 1808. Cobbett
wrote--
This experiment with Cowpox, which has cost the nation £30,000
to Dr. Jenner, is now, it seems, to have an Act of Parliament
to give it currency. Mr. Rose has brought in a bill for the
purpose of establishing a central institution in London for the
distribution of Cowpox matter, which bill in all appearance will
pass; and this disgusting and degrading remedy will cost the
nation another £4,000 or £5,000 annually, though it has been
clearly proved not to have answered the purpose intended. This,
however, I regard as cheap when compared with the menace of Mr.
Fuller, who, in the debate, proposed a compulsory law on the
subject. He took up the old idea of Mr. Wilberforce, who was for
a law to prevent parents from having their children inoculated
with Smallpox unless they chose to send them to pest-houses,
or to some place at a considerable distance from any other
habitations. This cruel and tyrannical proposition I opposed
at the time; and I am happy to perceive that it is now almost
universally exploded.
Whilst Cobbett could not arrest the action of Parliament, he
was short-sighted in considering that the proposed endowment of
vaccination was merely a question of the loss of a few thousands
a year. We are saddled with vaccination at this day, its costs
and mischiefs, by reason of the vote for the National Vaccine
Establishment in 1808. As soon as an annual subsidy is placed on
the estimates, interests are created, which not only perpetuate
themselves, but constantly tend to enlargement; and such interests,
once created, can only be got rid of when proved useless by
agitation out of doors and persistent pressure on the House of
Commons.
Referring to a notorious outbreak of smallpox among a vaccinated
population at Ringwood in Hampshire, Cobbett continued--
I should like to have heard Mr. Rose’s statement of the
circumstances at Ringwood, whence, he says, it is evident that
the failure arose “from the use of _improper matter_.” That many
persons, who had been inoculated with Cowpox, caught Smallpox and
died at Ringwood, is a fact that even the Royal Jennerian Society
cannot deny; and this being the case, what man in his senses
will put any faith in the efficacy of Cowpox as a preventive of
Smallpox? _The thing is done._ It _has failed_, and it is vain to
endeavour to prop up its reputation; for, in a few years, it will
become proverbial as humbug.
A prophecy, it will be said, that has not been fulfilled. True:
but in Cobbett’s time it advanced far to fulfilment. All the
unqualified promises under which vaccination was brought into
practice, were one by one surrendered under the compulsion of
experience. The mass of the people remained unvaccinated; the zeal
for vaccinating the poor abated; and the practice continued among
the middle and upper classes on the humblest pretexts--as something
that might hinder or mitigate smallpox, and in any case do little
harm. We have to recollect that the mania for vaccination which
now prevails is a revival of a prescription which our forefathers
had tested and found wanting. Vaccination fell into neglect, not
because there was indifference to smallpox, but because it did not
prevent that disease.
The excuse for the first failures of vaccination was, that spurious
cowpox must have been employed--spurious cowpox being the artful
invention of Jenner to cover disasters; artful, and yet absurd,
for how could cowpox exist spuriously any more than smallpox? The
precise fact, that spurious cowpox was the dodge of an unscrupulous
quack was unknown to Cobbett, but he was sharp enough to recognise
imposture, and thus wrote--
The pretext of _spurious matter_ is the weakest defence that ever
was set up, because it is evident that such will always be an
excuse. The Methodist pike who told his shoal of gudgeons that
_if they had faith_, they might jump into a chalk pit without so
much as spraining their ankles, answered all their reproaches
with saying, that their broken bones were owing to their own sin
in not having faith, and referred, for proof, to one among them
who had accidentally escaped unhurt. All who catch Smallpox and
die have been Cowpoxed with spurious matter, and all who have not
yet caught Smallpox, after the Cowpox operation, have had the
pure matter; and so it will be, to be sure, to the end of the
chapter.
_Who_ is to collect this genuine matter, and _whence_ is it to
come? Who shall tell whether he inoculate with Cowpox or King’s
Evil? Or with many other disorders, one of which I will not name,
but which I do hope, that fathers and mothers who have given
their children that greatest of blessing, a pure stream of blood,
will not forget when they are about to cause that blood to be
impregnated with matter taken from the ulcerous bodies of others.
In this latter warning, we have to remark Cobbett’s prescience.
He knew that it was impossible to transfer organic virus from
arm-to-arm without transferring more than was intended, inclusive
of the dreadful disease he indicated. Vaccinators naturally
denied the possibility of such extra transmission; for if they had
admitted the possibility, they must have ceased to vaccinate. M.
Ricord has put the alternative plainly--
The obvious fact is, that if ever the transmission of this
disease with vaccine lymph is clearly demonstrated, _Vaccination
must be altogether discontinued_.
The clear demonstration demanded by M. Ricord has been abundantly
supplied; and what at one time was conveniently considered
questionable, is now openly confessed. Mr. Brudenell Carter,
writing in the _Medical Examiner_, 24th May, 1877, testifies--
I think that syphilitic contamination by vaccine lymph is by
no means an unusual occurrence, and that it is very generally
overlooked because people do not know either when or where to
look for it. I think that a large proportion of the cases of
apparently inherited syphilis are in reality vaccinal; and that
the syphilis in these cases does not show itself until the age of
from eight to ten years, by which time the relation between cause
and effect is apt to be lost sight of.
And we have Sir Thomas Watson’s memorable declaration in the
_Nineteenth Century_, June, 1878--
I can readily sympathise with, and even applaud, a father who,
with the presumed dread or misgiving in his mind, is willing to
submit to multiplied judicial penalties rather than expose his
child to the risk of an infection so ghastly.
Thus belated, thus after infinite mischief to the public health,
the Nestor of Medicine appears and solemnly allows that the warning
of William Cobbett, given seventy years before, was a true warning,
and that worthy of praise are the wise parents who give it heed.
Cobbett, grateful for escape from compulsory vaccination,
overlooked, I said, the danger perpetuated through the endowment of
the practice. He was overjoyed at Canning’s emphatic declaration,
that “he could not imagine any circumstances whatever that
would induce him to follow up the most favourable report of the
infallibility of vaccination with any measure for its compulsory
infliction.” Hence he continued--
I am glad to perceive that the Ministry took care to intimate
their decided hostility to any law for propagating Cowpox by
_force_, by the aid of _pains_ and _penalties_. This being the
case, I care little about Mr. Rose and his Cowpox Institution.
Those who choose to have their children impregnated from that
shop, will be at liberty to do so; and those who wish to avoid
it, may. This is all right; though it may be very foolish for
Government to interfere in such a matter. I think we may thank
the events at Ringwood for the ministerial protest against
compulsory measures. It would have been curious enough to see
people paying penalties for being so obstinate as not to consult
their own health, or that of their children.
What Cobbett thought would be “curious enough” we witness daily.
English liberty, if it has advanced in some directions, has
gone back in others since Cobbett wrote. Parents are now haled
before magistrates, fined and imprisoned, because (knowing that
vaccination cannot avert smallpox, whilst it may seriously injure
the health of their children, and even cost them their lives) they
refuse to submit to the infliction. Never, perhaps, was there a
more impious invasion of liberty than compulsory vaccination, and
yet we have free and enlightened Englishmen who excuse and defend
it! These are the Pharisees of Liberalism, blatant over tyranny,
extinct or foreign, but dull to similar tyranny within their own
domain. They garnish the sepulchres of the prophets of freedom, but
(in their petty measure) repeat the deeds of those who persecuted
and slew them.
Lastly, in the article from which I have been quoting, Cobbett
assumed that the resort to the House of Commons for money was
evidence that the enthusiasm for vaccination was abating. He wrote--
The present application to Parliament is a pretty good proof that
Cowpox is beginning to be _blowed upon_. The Royal Jennerian
Society _wants funds_. The subscribers have fallen off; and so
application to the public purse has become necessary. _Why_
have the subscribers fallen off? Their _humanity_ has not waxed
cold. It were slander, indeed, to suppose that. But I suspect
that their _faith_ has waxed cold; and when that is the case,
zeal soon slackens its operations, more especially when these
operations consist chiefly in the expenditure of money.
The fact was, that as vaccination failures multiplied, Jenner
tried, _more suo_, to make a scape-goat of Walker, the Resident
Inoculator of the Royal Jennerian Society. There was a dreadful
row, and a secession of the better part of the members with Walker,
who set up the London Vaccine Institution. Those who adhered to
Jenner were not of the philanthropic and subscribing order, but
they had political influence, and used it to get rid of their
liabilities, first in obtaining a vote of £20,000 for Jenner, and
second in the establishment of a National Vaccine Establishment
with a subsidy of £3,000 a year.
So far Cobbett in his _Register_, where he had no occasion to
discuss vaccination again; but toward the end of his life, 1829-30,
he produced a series of papers entitled _Advice to Young Men_, in
which he reiterated and enforced his protest against the Jennerian
imposture--
I contend [he wrote] that the beastly application could not,
in nature, be efficacious in preventing Smallpox, the truth of
which assertion has now been proved in thousands upon thousands
of instances. For a long time, for ten years, the contrary was
boldly and brazenly asserted.... But Smallpox, in its worst form,
broke out at Ringwood, and carried off, I believe (I have not the
account at hand), more than a hundred persons, young and old,
_every one of whom had had the Cowpox “so nicely.”_ And what was
then said? Was the quackery exploded? Not at all: the failure
was imputed to _unskilful operators_: to the _staleness of the
matter_: to its not being of the _genuine quality_. Admitting all
this, the scheme stood condemned; for the great advantages held
forth were, that _anybody_ might perform the operation, and that
the matter was everywhere abundant and cost free.
But these were paltry excuses: the mere shuffles of quackery;
for what do we know now? Why, that in _hundreds_ of instances,
persons Cowpoxed by JENNER HIMSELF, have taken the real Smallpox
afterwards, and have either died from the disorder or narrowly
escaped with their lives! I will mention two instances. The first
is Sir Richard Phillips, whose son, several years after Jenner
had given him the insuring matter, had a very hard struggle
for life, under the hands of the old-fashioned, seam-giving,
and dimple-dipping Smallpox. The second is Philip Codd, Esq.,
of Rumstead Court, near Maidstone, whose son had a very narrow
escape under the real Smallpox, and who also had been Cowpoxed
_by Jenner himself_. Mr. Codd I have known, and have most
sincerely respected, from the time of our both being eighteen
years of age. When the young gentleman, his son, was very young,
I, having him on my knee one day, asked his kind and excellent
mother whether he had been _inoculated_. “Oh, no!” said she, “we
are going to have him _vaccinated_.” Whereupon I, going into the
garden to the father, said, “I do hope, Codd, that you are not
going to have that beastly cow-stuff put into that fine boy.”
“Why,” said he, “you see, Cobbett, it is to be done by _Jenner
himself_.” What answer I gave, what names and epithets I bestowed
upon Jenner and his quackery, I will leave the reader to imagine.
Now, here are instances enough; but every reader has heard of,
if not seen, scores of others. Young Mr. Codd caught Smallpox at
a school; and if I recollect rightly, there were several other
vaccinated youths who did the same at the same time. Quackery,
however, has always a shuffle left. Now that Cowpox has been
proved to be no guarantee against Smallpox, it makes it _milder_
when it comes! A pretty shuffle, indeed, this! You are to be all
your life in fear of it, having as your sole consolation, that
when it comes (and it may overtake you in a camp or on the seas)
it will be milder! It was not too mild to kill at Ringwood, and
its mildness, in the case of young Mr. Codd, did not restrain it
from blinding him for a suitable number of days.
I shall not easily forget the alarm and anxiety of Mr. and Mrs.
Codd on this occasion--both of them the best of parents, and both
of them punished for having yielded to fashionable quackery. I
will not say _justly_ punished; for affection for their children,
in which respect they were never surpassed by any parents on
earth, was the cause of their listening to the danger-obviating
quackery. This, too, is the case with other parents; but parents
should be under the influence of _reason_ and _experience_, as
well as under that of affection; and _now_, at any rate, they
ought to set this really dangerous quackery at naught.
Such was Cobbett’s case against vaccination, and I ask, Was he not
justified in his opposition? He saw vaccination introduced to the
world as an infallible preventive of smallpox, and he lived to
see the claim gradually minimised until reduced to that of making
smallpox milder! Even thus abated, he had to stigmatise the claim
as a last shuffle of quackery. It is asserted to this day, that
vaccination makes smallpox milder, but the pretence is exploded
whenever we demand, How do you know? In any case, or in any number
of cases of smallpox, Who can define the severity that has been
reduced by vaccination? any more than if I were to assert that
vaccination intensifies smallpox, it would be impossible to confute
me. We can only meet unverifiable assertion with indifference or
contempt. If it pleases people to believe in metempsychosis or the
constitution of the moon in green cheese, the wise leave them to
the enjoyment of their humour. On the other hand, I have to remark,
that smallpox is a disease of wide range of intensity, from an
ailment almost trivial to one invariably fatal; and this wide range
of intensity was as characteristic of the disease before as since
the introduction of vaccination. On what pretext then are mild
cases of smallpox attributed to the influence of vaccination? There
are mild and malignant cases of smallpox alike among the vaccinated
and unvaccinated, and not unfrequently when the vaccinated and
unvaccinated are found in approximate conditions, as in the same
household, it is the unvaccinated who are most lightly afflicted,
or who make the better recovery.
It often helps to a clearer apprehension of a position if we
endeavour to conceive its opposite. We have seen Cobbett as
an opponent of vaccination: let us try to think of him as its
advocate. Suppose he had joined with the polite and educated mob in
hailing Jenner as the saviour of mankind from smallpox, and assured
the readers of the _Register_ that they would be secure from the
disease for ever if inoculated with cowpox--an easy and harmless
operation. Then after a while imagine him reporting that he had
been misled--that the operation was not so easy as represented,
nor always so harmless. By and bye he would be the bearer of a
more serious revelation. Some of the vaccinated, warranted secure,
had taken smallpox, but such misadventures, he would explain, were
due to the use of a wrong sort of cowpox, of which there was a
spurious variety. But the suggestion of spurious cowpox creating
alarm and discouragement of vaccination, it would be necessary for
him to counteract the declaration with the avowal that by spurious
cowpox was not meant spurious cowpox, but simply irregularities
in the action of the genuine virus on the arms of the vaccinated.
But even these excuses would be insufficient. It was not difficult
to ascribe smallpox after vaccination to careless practice, or
to virus that was not the right sort of cowpox; but when smallpox
was found to occur in numerous instances after Jenner’s own
vaccinations and those of the most accomplished practitioners, What
was to be said? Why, what was said, that when vaccination did not
prevent smallpox, it made it milder!
Imagine, if we can, Cobbett’s honest and vigorous intelligence
retreating through this slush of apology and prevarication! Yet
through such slush every follower of Jenner had to trudge.
I am not intent on setting Cobbett forth as a model of wisdom.
I simply maintain that his common-sense was adequate to the
judgment of vaccination, and that it was correctly exercised. Of
physiology and hygiene he was as ignorant as his contemporaries;
but if a lotion were sold to prevent toothache, and it did not
prevent toothache, it would be safe to denounce its vendors as
quacks, even though the vendors happened to be the Royal College
of Physicians and the Royal College of Surgeons. The causes of
disease were unconsidered in Cobbett’s days. It was not asked why
people suffered from smallpox and other fevers, nor whether fevers
were avoidable. Such maladies were accepted like bad weather, and
encountered by medical dodges, or by charms like vaccination, the
more irrational and nasty being taken for the more effective.
Cobbett himself, if he did not believe in vaccination, believed in
inoculation with smallpox. He had his children poxed in infancy,
and when he argued against vaccination, it was in the confident
possession of a surer prophylactic. Taking smallpox for a probable
calamity that could only occur once in a lifetime, it seemed to him
expedient to incur the disease when convenient, and to have done
with the dread of it. How far he was mistaken in this course I need
not stay to debate. Suffice it to say, that he thought he could
make sure that smallpox was smallpox, whilst what cowpox might be
none could tell, especially after transmission through arms and
constitution unnumbered and unknown.
The causes of smallpox, I said, were unconsidered in Cobbett’s
days. It never even entered into Jenner’s head that the disease
might be a consequence of bad conditions of life; nor did he try
to explain why the malady was on the decrease ere he appeared
with his magical prescription. The decrease was claimed for
vaccination, but it had set in before vaccination was heard of,
and was continued among those who never received it. No sanitary
improvements had been effected to account for the abatement of
the disease. To what, then, was it due? I answer, in part at
least, to a progressive change in the diet of the people--to the
substitution of tea for malt liquors, and to the displacement of
arid fare by potatoes. The food of city folk up to the close of
last century was closely akin to that of men at sea, and their
scorbutic habit of body was notorious--a habit that rendered acute
or chronic whatever disorders they were subject to. The remedy came
of inclination and necessity rather than of intention. Tea was
instinctively preferred by women, and the dearness of provisions
compelled resort to the potato, easily grown and grateful to the
palate as a mitigant of the saltness of beef, bacon, and fish. If
any are disposed to dispute the fact of this revolution in the
popular dietary, they may be referred to Cobbett. He witnessed the
change, and persistently denounced it. Tea-drinking was to him an
abomination. It was a slatternly indulgence, costly to the poor,
and innutritious. Potatoes were as detestable. They were trash
as compared with bread; wasteful, dirty, and unfit to satisfy a
man’s appetite. It is true that tea and potatoes are poor forms of
food, but the one as a substitute for beer, and the other as an
antiscorbutic, were eminently useful. It is not said that smallpox
is caused or prevented by food, proper or improper, but that the
character of food may predispose to disease, and intensify it; as
is manifest on ship-board. Hence it is (in the absence of other
adequate influences) that I am disposed to ascribe the abatement
of smallpox which set in toward the close of last century to
the better blood of the people ameliorated by that increased
consumption of tea and potatoes, against which Cobbett so blindly
and vainly testified.
A last word about Cobbett. His prejudices had nearly always a
creditable root. He hated potatoes because they were strenuously
recommended by Wilberforce and other good and goody people as cheap
food for the poor. Cobbett’s contention was, that not cheap food,
but political justice was the true remedy for popular misery. It
was very nice of Wilberforce and his friends to be kind to the
poor, but, said Cobbett, if they were first just, the poor might
dispense with their kindness. If the poor had their own, they might
have beer instead of tea, and bread and beef and bacon instead
of potatoes, with much else besides. Cobbett was often enough in
error, but behind all his perversities lay ardent good-will for
the welfare of the greatest number of his countrymen; and the
consideration now enjoyed by the working classes is largely due to
his dauntless spirit and unwearied exertions in presence of what
appeared at the time to be omnipotent opposition.
FOOTNOTES:
[180] _Advice to Young Men._ London, 1837. Sec. 262.
[181] _Political Register_, 22nd January, 1803.