interest" the "fair merchant" and the "honest industrious tradesmen, who holds the middle rank, and has given repeated proofs, that he prefers law and liberty to gold."

For Cobbett, it was above all government borrowing that gave rise to a new breed of "jobbers, brokers, and peculators." Under the "paper system," government was no longer financed by current revenue but by loans from wealthy subjects, who thus gained a decisive influence over the state. A national debt and a standing army—itself a drain on the public treasury, necessitating further loans—led to the emergence of a society "in which there are but two classes of men," as Cobbett put it, "masters and abject dependents." ^* Paine attributed the same result to the rise of a "landed monopoly" that had "dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance" and thus "created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before." Both he and Cobbett deplored the "enslaving reverence" for "affluence," in Paine's words, and believed that "wealth and splendor, instead of fascinating the multitude," ought to "excite emotions of disgust." Both men allowed their politics, in other words, to be governed in large part by their instinctive revulsion against wealth, whereas Adam Smith, it will be recalled, agreed that respect for the "vain and empty distinctions of greatness" was misplaced but welcomed this "deception" as the source of industry and economic progress.

This comparison of Paine and Cobbett suggests that republican ideology had lost most of its larger resonance by this time and survived mainly in the form of an egalitarian dislike of social extremes, a preference for plain living, and an unmitigated disgust with the growing pretensions of

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Here again, his analysis of the source of "corruption," as well as his rhetoric, derived straight from the country-party tradition. In Cato's Letters, the classic exposition of eighteenth-century republicanism, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon attacked the moneylenders in the same language later used by Cobbett: "What Briton, blessed with any sense of virtue, or with common sense: what Englishmen, animated with a public spirit, or with any spirit, but must burn with rage and shame, to behold the nobles and gentry of a great Kingdom ... bowing down ... before the face of a dirty stock-jobber, and receiving laws from men bred behind counters, and the decision of their fortunes from hands, still dirty with sweeping shops!"

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