Note 3 — Chapter XXIII · “WHATEVER OTHER FAULTS I MAY HAVE, THAT OF LETTING GO MY HOLD IS NOT ONE.”

That cruel urgency, want of space, forbids the insertion here of many a smart illustrative extract from Cobbett’s American writings. The following must suffice, being parts of a letter “to the people of Botley,” dated 10th November, 1818:—

“My old Neighbours,—Great as the distance between you and me is, I very often think of you, and especially when I buy salt, which our neighbour Warner used to sell us for 19s. a bushel, and which I buy here for 2s. 6d. This salt is made, you know, down somewhere by Hamble. This very salt, when brought here from England, has all the charges of freight, insurance, wharfage, steerage to pay. It pays, besides, one third of its value in duty to the American Government before it be landed here. Then, you will observe, there is the profit of the American salt merchant; and then that of the shopkeeper who sells me the salt. And, after all this, I buy that very Hampshire salt for 2s. 6d. a bushel, English measure. What a Government, then, must that of the borough-mongers be! The salt is a gift of God. It is thrown on the shore. And yet these tyrants will not suffer us to use it until we have paid them 15s. a bushel for liberty to use it.…

“You are compelled to pay the borough-mongers a heavy tax on your candles and soap. You dare not make candles and soap, though you have the fat and the ashes in abundance. If you attempt to do this, you are taken up and imprisoned; and if you resist, soldiers are brought to shoot you. This is freedom, is it? Now we, here, make our own candles and soap. Farmers sometimes sell soap and candles, but they never buy any. A labouring man, or a mechanic, buys a sheep now and then. Three or four days’ work will buy a labourer a sheep to weigh sixty pounds, with seven or eight pounds of loose fat. The meat keeps very well, in winter, for a long time. The wool makes stockings, and the loose fat is made into candles and soap. The year before I left Hampshire, a poor woman at Holly Hill had dipped some rushes in grease to use instead of candles. An exciseman found it out, went and ransacked her house, and told her that, if the rushes had had another dip, they would have been candles, and she must have gone to gaol! Why, my friends, if such a thing were told here, nobody would believe it.…

“I have had living with me an English labourer. He smokes tobacco, and he tells me that he can buy as much tobacco here for three cents, that is about three English half-pence, as he could buy in England for three shillings. The leather has no tax on it here; so that, though the shoemaker is paid a high price for his labour, the labouring man gets his shoes very cheap. In short, there is no excise here, no property tax, no assessed taxes. We have no such men as Chiddel and Billy Tovey to come and take our money from us; no window-peepers; no spies to keep a look out as to our carriages, and horses, and dogs.… We may wear hair-powder if we like, without paying for it, and a boy in our houses may whet our knives without our paying 2l. a year for it.”

“I have talked to several farmers here about the tithes in England, and they laugh. They sometimes almost make me angry, for they seem, at last, not to believe what I say when I tell them that the English farmer gives, and is compelled to give, the parson a tenth part of his whole crop, and of his fruit, and milk, and eggs, and calves, and lambs, and pigs, and wool, and honey. They cannot believe this. They treat it as a sort of romance.…

“To another of my neighbours … I was telling the story about the poor woman at Holly Hill, who had nearly dipped her rushes once too often. He is a very grave and religious man. He looked very seriously at me, and said that falsehood was falsehood, whether in jest or earnest.”