cise of the common people ... that tends to prepare them for deeds of bravery of a higher order" and "to preserve the independence and the liberties of their country."

To link Cobbett to the country-party tradition requires no historiographical sleight of hand. He drew the link himself, noting that in the old days England had been divided into "a Court Party and a Country Party, the latter of which was always ready to defend the rights of the people." In his own day, Cobbett said, the country party had tied its fortunes to the Prince of Wales and thus become a court party in its own right, with the result that "the people had no party at all." His standard remained the rural England of his youth—a prosperous society, as he remembered it in the days before "the system" had deprived Englishmen of their beef, their rough sports, and their manly independence. Paine's doubts about progress rested on the conventional contrast between civilization and a state of nature. "A great portion of mankind, in what are called civilized countries, are in a state of poverty and wretchedness, far below the condition of an Indian." (Similar statements can be found in the writings of Adam Smith.) When Cobbett talked of decline, however, he referred to a decline that had taken place in his own lifetime.

Well do I remember, when old men, common labourers, used to wear to church good broad-cloth coats which they had worn at their weddings. They were frugal and careful, but they had encouragement to practise those virtues. The household goods of a labouring man, his clock, his trenchers and his pewter plates, his utensils of brass and copper, his chairs, his jointstools, his substantial oaken tables, his bedding and all that belonged to him, form a contrast with his present miserable and worthless stuff that makes one's heart ache but to think of.

As Kramnick and Michael Foot observe, "Cobbett looked back to a medieval golden age; Paine looked forward to a Utopia, to the perfectibility of man." Yet Cobbett came to see Paine as a comrade in arms, and not without reason. They both despised monopolists, speculators, and middlemen—"plunderers" and "bloodsuckers," as Cobbett referred to them, who live in "riot and luxury" on the "plunder of the ignorant, the innocent, the helpless." Both exempted from their attack on the "monied

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