The political career of William Cobbett, a fierce antagonist of Paine in his youth but a great admirer in his later years, illustrates the difficulty of forcing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debate into airtight compartments like "Lockean liberalism" and "civic humanism." Cobbett spoke the language of republicanism, yet he wrote a eulogistic life of Paine and dug up his bones on Long Island for transportation back to England. This belated act of homage appears all the more bizarre in view of the obvious differences between the two men. Paine extolled cosmopolitanism, whereas Cobbett was a fervent patriot who assured his countrymen, on the eve of his flight to the United States in 1817, that he would "always be a foreigner in every country but England." With characteristic exaggeration, he once called Ben Franklin's maxim, "Where liberty is, there is my country"—a saying eminently worthy of Paine as well—"as immoral and vile a sentiment as ever disgraced the mind of man." Paine spent most of his life in cities; Cobbett celebrated country pleasures and despised the "effeminating luxuries" of the metropolis. Paine advocated commercial development; Cobbett opposed it, partly on the very grounds that appealed to Paine—that it would bring nations closer together. That commerce promoted "intimate connection and almost intermixture with foreign nations" did not recommend it in Cobbett's eyes. On the contrary, he thought of foreign trade as another source of "contagious effeminacy."

Paine, raised as a Quaker, hated war (although he urged Quakers to support the war for American independence), whereas Cobbett never lost his enthusiasm for the manly arts, "which string the nerves and strengthen the frame, which excite an emulation in deeds of hardihood and valour, and which imperceptibly instill honour, generosity, and a love of glory, into the mind of the clown." Paine thought of himself as a humanitarian; Cobbett relished blood sports, dueling, and armed combat. He regarded the humanitarianism of William Wilberforce, his lifelong bête noire, as one more evidence of civic decline. Denouncing a bill to outlaw boxing and bearbaiting, he resorted to the republican idiom in order to trace six stages of national decline: "Commerce, Opulence, Luxury, Effeminacy, Cowardice, and Slavery." Wilberforce and his Society for the Suppression of Vice sought to abolish, Cobbett said, "every exer

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