At the same time, capitalists and stock-jobbers were amassing wealth, in an unprecedented degree; whilst more than a million sterling, annually, was diverted from the public resources, into the pockets of sinecurists. All the idleness and luxury, thus created, helped to augment the price of the necessaries of life; and the inevitable consequences of unproductive expenditure ensued, in a continued diminution of the resources of those persons who earned their living. And what was the _bolus_, proposed to be applied for the cure of this alarming cancer? _Educate the children of the poor!_ Positively! As though the children of the poor (at least, of the rural poor) did not pick up their education day by day, from the moment that they could crawl out into the fields to scare away the rooks; as though ploughing, mowing, threshing, and reaping,--loading a waggon, and guiding a team, could not be better acquired, on the old lines, than by having the unreceptive bucolic brain first gorged with reading, writing, and arithmetic! And this new reforming agency, mark you, was to be a further expense to the rate-payers; already at their wits’ end to know how, themselves, to keep the wolf from the door. Is it any wonder, then, that persons who, like Mr. Cobbett, not only knew the real wants and temptations, and difficulties of the labourer, raised their voices indignantly? That it should be imputed to the poor, that it was their IGNORANCE and VICE which had brought them low: that any other cause, but the increase of luxurious idlers, and the draining of the national resources by exorbitant taxation, could lie at the root of the evil: that a generation of plutocrats should have grown up, who looked upon the “lower orders” as of less consequence than their horses, their dogs, and their poultry, was not to be borne in silence, whilst the pen of a ready writer was at hand to defy such thoughtless misrepresentation. From this time, then, until the period of his death, Cobbett’s voice was raised on behalf of the suffering Labouring Classes of England. An adequate return for their labour, and some respect toward them as fellow-creatures, he was determined to get; and he would suffer no opposition, no ignominy, to hinder his endeavours. * * * * * But, what was his own practice; and what was the condition of the labourers in his own service?