Again, on the question of Emigration, nothing could be more emphatic than Cobbett’s warning. “To give people,” he writes, “the choice of starvation at home or transportation to Canada is only in fact giving them a choice of the time at which they shall be starved to death.” He proceeds to enlarge on the miseries which many emigrants undoubtedly suffered in their new homes, and to warn English labourers against believing the highly coloured reports published by Emigration Societies. “What monsters,” he adds, (and we would commend his words to some of our modern “philanthropists,”) “are those who compose what are called ‘Emigration Societies’ or Colonial Associations,’ and what a Government, and what a Parliament must those be who not only do not put down, but who seem to encourage, these undertakings; and who can quietly hear men talk of clearing their estates, as we talk of clearing a homestead of vermin!” It is usually understood that homicide is prohibited by the laws of England, but as Cobbett points out, there are various ways of evading the commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” when anything is to be gained by the forbidden process. “If the landlords have a right,” he says, “be the pretence what it may, to eject the natives from the land; if they have a right, taking the whole body of them together, to turn one single family out on the bare ground, without providing for them another place of abode, then they have the right of killing; and this too in the face of the law which declares that constant protection from birth to death is due from the State to every many as the sole foundation of its claim to his allegiance.”
It was not to be wondered that a man who could write like this should be persecuted and calumniated by the capitalists of his time. By his “Legacy to Labourers” Cobbett wish to remind the working people in England “that they once had a friend whom neither the love of gain on the one hand, nor the fear of loss on the other, could seduce from his duty towards God, towards his country, and towards them; that that friend was born in a cottage and bred to the plough; men in mighty power were thirty-four years endeavouring to destroy him; that in spite of all this he became a member of Parliament, freely chosen by the sensible and virtuous and spirited people of Oldham; and that his name was William Cobbett.”
Henry S. Salt
Justice, No. 73, June 6, 1885, p. 2
More by Henry Salt
- The Widening Horizon, The Vegetarian News, May 1928
- Social Liberty, Progress, June 1884
- Theory and Practice, Justice, February 21, 1885
- A Forgotten Socialist Poet, The Labour Leader, November 12, 1909
- Some Revolutionary Poets of the Century, The Labour Leader, June 19, 1897