ABSTRACT
After the Anti-Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800, not until 1871 did trade unions in Britain cease to be unlawful conspiracy. Indeed serfdom, called bluntly by the lawyers ' slavery,' had not ceased in the Scottish mines until the Act of 1775—and was then abolished as ' discouraging the supply of labour.' Cobbett, however, had wider causes of trouble to explore than the case of the honest, gallant Sergeant Smaller. The battle for Political Democracy was in process, in his own days, of being won; but the battle for Economic Democracy —of Democracy as a way of life, in which men lived equally save so far as the common social advantage or difference of talent, not accident or acquisitiveness, dictated otherwise—this battle was only just beginning. Cobbett's protest was economic; but his remedy in terms of social justice was political.
