The objects which Cobbett now professed to have in view were considerably in advance of those of some years previously; and their publication, in this address, shows distinctly the rapid growth of opinion amongst the mass of the people. Not only the abolition of sinecures, and of all pensions the merit of which could not be readily granted; abolition of tithes; reduction of the standing army; and an equitable adjustment of the currency, were recapitulated, as reforms urgently called for; but he now declared that the National Debt ought to be wiped out, by the sale of ecclesiastical estates, the misapplied portion of the property of corporate bodies, and all the Crown lands; and so to reduce taxation, and the cost of its collection, as to give some hopes of greater prosperity and happiness to “this industrious nation.” Of course, these things were “revolutionary” for that age. Every great change is revolutionary; but the bad odour attaching to an epithet, in some minds, is no index to the value of the ideas represented. Important changes in the mode of government, particularly as to a greatly-lessened waste of public money, naturally appeared monstrous and wicked to the governing classes, and to their adherents; at a period when bishops died worth half-a-million. And it came just as naturally to the minds of the reformers, the longer the question was delayed, that, by whatever name their proposals might be designated, there could be nothing so monstrous and wicked as to persist in a system which made the rich richer and the poor poorer. The events of the past fifteen years had made a wonderful difference in the minds of the labouring classes. The power of a cheap serial, first exemplified in the publication of Cobbett’s twopenny _Register_, had become fully recognized. The _Penny Magazine_, _Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal_, and similar publications were now beginning their respective careers with astonishing success; along with a host of political sheets. A new sort of education was spreading: that sort of education which made men think for themselves; and, for the first time in history, the “lower orders” were beginning to take an interest in the affairs of other nations beside their own. Well might statesmen be affrighted at the progress of revolution in France and Belgium, and at the growing importance of the American Republic! The knowledge of political good and evil, fresh from those democratic sources, might well alarm them; for it was sinking deep into minds, the fertility of which had been produced by their own haughty failures.