Agriculture:-
§"Cranberries, the finest fruit for tarts that ever grew, are bought for about a dollar a bushel, and they will keep for five months." (Resid. U.S.)
Class:-
§"The foul, the stinking, the carrion baseness, of the fellows that call themselves country gentlemen." (Rur. Rides.)
Credit:-
§"The man therefore who purchases on trust [credit] not only pays for the trust, but he also pays his due share of what the tradesman loses by trust." (Adv. Yng. Man.)
Education:-
§Cobbett's view, back then, was that children would be better off learning from their parents. The main thing that children learn when cooped up in a school is laziness. He was also against a general tax on all to support those who were headed in any profession that required book learning. Why, I suppose, should the poor be made to pay so the children of the rich might be educated. Cobbett was of the general view that what the poor family needed was more bread, bacon and beer. (See Spater, vol.2, pp.540-1.)
Government:-
§"Faction and favouritism are the high roads to power." (Pol. Reg. XIV.)
§"The out party proposed to pass a law [etc.]. The in party said that such a law was unnecessary." (Pol. Reg. XXXII.)
§"Public property is never so well taken care of as private property; and this, too, on the maxim, that that which is every body's business is nobody's business." (Advice to Young Men.)
Health:-
§"[Health will be secured] by early-rising, exercise, sobriety, and abstemiousness as to food." (See Spater, vol.1, p.94.) Cobbett, it should be noted, "never used sugar, coffee, or rum because they were the produce of slavery." (See Spater, vol.1, p.205.)
Laws:-
§"What of Excise Laws and Custom Laws and Combination Laws and Libel Laws, a human being scarcely knows what he dares do or say." (Cott. Econ.)
Love:-
§"Love is a great leveller; a perfect Radical." (Weekly Reg. 30 Mar. 779.)
Moneyless:-
§"Every insolvent blames a solvent, that will not lend him money." (Rur. Rides.)
Money, Paper:-
§A sizable portion of government expenditure was attributable to maintaining the debt that was particularly high coming out of the Napoleonic wars, circa 1815. That a third of the collected taxes was used to serve the national debt was a situation which Cobbett abhorred.
§"Industrious and care-taking creatures reduced to beggary by bank-paper." (Rur. Rides.)
§"The desolating and damnable system of paper-money." (Rur. Rides.)
§"To put an end to the gains of the paper-money people." (Rur. Rides.)
§"It is boundless joy to me, to contemplate this infernal system [of paper-money] in its hour of wreck: swag here; crack there: scroop this way: souse that way." (Rur. Rides.)
Nova Scotia:-
§"When in New Brunswick I saw the great wild grey cat, which is there called a Lucifee." (Rur. Rides.)
§"A rascally heap of sand and rock, and swamp, called Prince Edward's Island." (Rur. Rides.)
Reformers:-
§"Reformers, not so well able to express as to think, would have had an answer to all questions relating to their views." (Pol. Reg. XXXIII.)
Shakespeare:-
§"It was fashion alone that cause people to applaud "under the name of Shakespeare, what they would hoot off the stage in a moment, if it came forth under any other name." (See Spater, vol.2, p.538.)
Taxes:-
§"The immense sums, thus pinched from the millions, and put into the hands of thousands." (Weekly Reg. 13 Apr. 69.)
Universities:-
§"Dens of Dunces." Cobbett claimed that such institutions were the mortal enemies of youth, destroyers of time and talent and detrimental to the independence of mind in political matters. (See Spater, vol.2, p.539.)
Writing:-
§"I defy the Attorney General, and even the Devil himself, to produce from my writings any one essay, which is not written in the spirit of peace." (Wks. XXXII.)
