[6] It appeared, from a petition presented to the House of Commons by Mr. Cobbett, that a policeman, one William Popay, had been acting the part of an amateur spy, by joining several political unions of the time, and had even urged their members to the adoption of violent courses. This discovery, and the debate thereon, produced great excitement at the time; and Popay was, in consequence of the report of the Committee, dismissed from the police force. CHAPTER XXVII. “I HAVE BEEN THE GREAT ENLIGHTENER OF THE PEOPLE OF ENGLAND.”[1] So this long fight was over. For forty years past, Cobbett had waged incessant warfare against political hypocrisy and corruption; here represented by revolutionary theorists; there by political adventures; now, by venal courtiers; again, by uncompromising partisanship in the press. Heedless of personal danger, and proud of his native soil and of his fellow-countrymen, he had never flinched from the pursuit of those whom he regarded as the enemies of his country’s welfare. Often blindly passionate, but always honest, and dominated by the convictions of the hour, he had presented the unexampled phenomenon of a man who could face, single-handed, the world in arms; insusceptible alike to the arts of intrigue, and to the cozening of partisanship. The character of the London newspaper press, in the earlier years of the present century, bears no comparison with its now-existing posterity, either in character, ability, or influence. Our leading journal, indeed, should scarcely know its own grandfather: appealing, as it does, to the taste of the most highly-cultivated minds of the age; and quite indifferent to anything but the task of representing the best public opinion of the day. As for a “government organ,” there is no such thing; your newspaper now gets upon the wings of the day, or what it supposes the wings of the day, and there catches the best breeze that it can. There is no space for mutual recriminations, with ostentation of “private wire,” and elaborate political and literary reviews, if even the taste for dirt-throwing had not vanished. The doctrine of the survival of the fittest is found to hold good, in journalism as in everything else; and there cannot, possibly, be any better token of the improvement of the age, in taste and morals, than the elevated tone of the more successful leaders of public opinion in our own days.