An Aristocracy of Mere Wealth
Richard Cobden was not a little envious of the USA’s open and can-do society, but he did not covet her republicanism.
1835
King William IV 1830-1837
Richard Cobden was not a little envious of the USA’s open and can-do society, but he did not covet her republicanism.
1835
King William IV 1830-1837
In 1835 the USA stood for strict public economy (that year the national debt hit zero for the first and last time), military restraint, and wise investment of taxpayers’ dollars. These things, Richard Cobden believed, England could usefully copy; but not republicanism. A British republic, he said, she would merely replace one kind of aristocracy with a much less noble one.
THEY who argue in favour of a republic, in lieu of a mixed monarchy, for Great Britain, are, we suspect, ignorant of the genius* of their countrymen.
Democracy forms no element in the materials of English character. An Englishman is from his mother’s womb an aristocrat. Whatever rank or birth, whatever fortune, trade, or profession may be his fate, he is, or wishes, or hopes to be an aristocrat. The insatiable love of caste that in England, as in Hindostan,* devours all hearts, is confined to no walks of society, but pervades every degree, from the highest to the lowest.*
Of what conceivable use then would it be to strike down the lofty patricians that have descended to us from the days of the Normans and Plantagenets, if we, of the middle class, who are more than any other enslaved to this passion, are prepared to lift up, from amongst ourselves, an aristocracy of mere wealth, — not less austere, not less selfish, — only less noble than that we had deposed.
* ‘Genius’ here (in accord with the original Latin word) means an inborn spirit or instinct.
* Hindostan or Hindustan was originally a Persian term for what is now Pakistan and northwestern India. In English, it was often applied to those areas of British India which were predominantly Hindu rather than Muslim.
* In a footnote, Cobden recalled reading about a Bow Street court case in which a knife-grinder and chair-mender named Solomon Lovell had begged the court to intervene after his wife of just three days, Desdemona Cocks, aged forty-three, was spirited away to a garret in Charles Street, off Drury Lane, because her haughty friends thought she had married beneath her station. They themselves were ‘in the costermongering line’, i.e. they were mobile street vendors selling groceries from a cart.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.