There is no doubt at all, that many unscrupulous men were in the front, at the time in which we are now interested--many who, having once made their influence felt, were enabled with the assistance of fortune and audacity to hold their own; in spite of public exposure, their vigour and native abilities made them necessary to their party.[6] This was the class of men that Cobbett loved to fight--a class unknown in the land whence he came: indeed, unknown to the world of men which he had himself created; for it must be noted that Mr. Cobbett had a very limited acquaintance with human nature in its depths. The reading and study, which he had gone through some years before, were all of too abstract a character to make a man of the world (as it is called). Mankind from books he knew well, an ideal Mankind, which the self-educated are especially liable to conjure up, and by means of its gigantic and perfect form, to hide that subtle, wayward, self-absorbed creature of many motives, called MAN. In this superficiality, as regards the hidden springs of human action, and the consequent inability to transfer himself, mentally, into the standpoint of his antagonist, lies the key to Cobbett’s frequent failure, just when a little considerate yielding to the feelings of that antagonist would have produced conviction. There were certain rough notions of perfectibility about his conceptions of Humanity which did not admit of the smallest incline toward what he thought to be wrong. In short, he was a Soldier, from beginning to end; and as a soldier he lived, and worked, and wrote, and fought, with his face to the enemy;--which enemy must needs be dealt with uncompromisingly, if it meant fighting at all. * * * * * The city of Philadelphia, with all its native and acquired advantages, at last got an unenviable distinction, toward the close of the last century, as a plague-spot. As in all such capitals, increasing almost too rapidly, the population crowded together in limited space; and the dissolute and the very poor, as those classes always do under similar circumstances, began to be a detriment to the health of the city. Sluggish drainage and indifferent water-supply did their fell work. Nearly half of the children born in the city died under two years of age, with stomach or bowel complaints. At last, in 1793, the yellow fever, which had not visited the city for thirty-one years, reappeared, and carried off 4000 inhabitants in the course of about three months. And with the yellow fever came the doctors, of course; who, amongst themselves, roused one of those curious disputes for which the history of medical science is somewhat famous. A yellow-fever literature sprang up; statistics were brandished about; wonderful and novel remedies were suggested; and one of the more ingenious of the doctors came to the front in the person of Benjamin Rush.