In politics he was as little of a reactionary as his opponent, who if “in principle a Republican was in practice a Whig.”[783] He followed Fox rather than Burke, and lost neither his head nor his temper over the Revolution. “Malthus will prove a peace-monger,” wrote Southey in 1808.[784] He was a steady friend of Catholic Emancipation. He saw the folly of attributing with Godwin and Paine all evil to the Government, and with Cobbett all evil to taxation and the funds;[785] but he is one with them all in dislike of standing armies, and is more alarmed at the overbearing measures of the Government against sedition than at the alleged sedition itself. One of the most remarkable chapters in the second edition of the essay[786] is on “the effects of the knowledge of the principal cause of poverty on civil liberty.” Its main argument is, that, where there is much distress and destitution, there will be much discontent and sedition, and, where there is much of the two last, there will be much coercion and despotism. A knowledge of the chief cause of poverty by taking away the distress would leave Government at least no excuse for tyranny. “The pressure of distress on the lower classes of people, together with the habit of attributing this distress to their rulers, appears to me to be the rock of defence, the castle, the guardian spirit of despotism. It affords to the tyrant the fatal and unanswerable plea of necessity. It is the reason why every free Government tends constantly to destruction, and that its appointed guardians become daily less jealous of the encroachments of power.”[787] The French people had been told that their unhappiness was due to their rulers; they overthrew their rulers, and, finding their distress not removed, they sacrificed the new rulers; and this process would have continued indefinitely if despotism had not been found preferable to anarchy. In England “the Government of the last twenty years[788] has shown no great love of peace or liberty,” and the country gentlemen have apparently surrendered themselves to Government on condition of being protected from the mob.[789] A few more scarcities like 1800 might cause such convulsions and lead to such sternness of repression that the British constitution would end as Hume foretold,[790] in “absolute monarchy, the easiest death, the true _euthanasia_ of the British constitution.” The “tendency of mobs to produce tyranny” can only be counteracted by the subversion, not of the tyrants, but of the mobs. The result would be a lean and wiry people, weak for offence, but strong for defence; there would be freedom at home and peace abroad.[791]