Cobbett’s short career in Parliament has, sometimes, been stigmatized as a failure. It was not a failure. He was a very regular attendant while his health lasted; and he never lost an opportunity of reminding the House what he had been sent there for. And the numerous interruptions and contradictions to which he at first became subject, rather manifested “failure” elsewhere: viz. on the part of many members to understand the awful exigencies of the time, and the responsibility which they ought to have attached to their own position. But their sensibilities were far too keen, to bear with patience Mr. Cobbett’s frequent references to the burdens under which the people still laboured; one member, at last, expressing an opinion that “the constant complaints respecting the distresses of the people were of the most injurious tendency: they were calculated to make all classes politicians”! In short, the first reformed Parliament was, itself, a great failure; and was rightly sent back to the country at the end of two unproductive sessions. It must be said, however, that the first two or three months of Mr. Cobbett’s attendance in Parliament were not calculated to impress the House in his favour. Although he put up with malicious references to Tom Paine, and to agricultural incendiarism, with remarkable good temper, there was an amount of indiscretion about his mode of bringing up his own special topics, which mightily offended the taste of less self-assertive people. And, upon one occasion, his mode of procedure was so absurd, that he covered both himself and his cause with overwhelming contempt. The circumstances were these:-- A number of gentlemen, led by Mr. Attwood, the member for Birmingham, conceived it to be only just and proper that an inquiry should be made into the state of the country, and the prevailing distress.[5] Lord Althorp considered any such inquiry unadvisable, “because it might lead to an investigation of the consequences produced by the changes in the currency;”--he was willing to consider the subject when it came fairly before the House, but objected to the proposed mode of entertaining it. The motion was lost, by a narrow majority; and it was renewed, about a month afterwards, in another form, only to fail again. Thus, the Whig ministry set their faces against the very Reformers which they had themselves called up. But Mr. Cobbett wants, above all things, the very thing that Lord Althorp deprecates: “an investigation of the consequences produced by the changes in the currency,” and he is resolved to have it, one way or another. And he can think of no surer means than that of fixing the _onus_ of the public distresses upon the author of those changes in the currency, which he had always considered to be a leading cause of the distress.