“The ancient nobility and gentry of the kingdom…have been thrust out of all public employment…a race of merchants, and manufacturers and bankers and loan-jobbers and contractors have usurped their place.”

Political Register (10-17 July 1802), quoted in Karl W. Schweizer and John W. Osborne, Cobbett and His Times (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990), p. 8.

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William Cobbett 58
English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist 1763–1835

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