No one, I think, has ever ventured to compare Mr. A. J. Cook with William Cobbett. If we are to judge by the daily press, Mr. Cook is not a popular man among the ruling classes, among the middle classes, nor even among the working classes. Not the ignorance of journalists, but the policy of newspaper owners—a remarkably small class, and daily growing smaller—is responsible for the abuse heaped upon Mr. Cook. If he has not been compared with William Cobbett, it is not because Cobbett is less well-known than he ought to be, but also that his views would be as unpopular to-day as are those of Mr. Cook. Cobbett has not yet been dead long enough for his views to be regarded dispassionately by the majority, and a century hence Mr. Cook will still have his critics. But his critics will not then be malicious. He will still be branded as an ‘agitator,’ but common sense will show that British miners and not Russian Bolsheviks were his paymasters.

The Rural Rides show Cobbett to have been a keen observer, not only of nature—for he was a born farmer —but of that continually changing thing which we call the social organism. Observation of the present led him to study the past: from the effect he traced the cause, and to this we owe his History of the Protestant Reformation, which showed that upheaval to have been in this country an economic rather than a religious movement.