On British Freedom Classic Reprint

Author : William Cobbett
Publisher : Forgotten Books
ISBN 13 : 9780428969493
Total Pages : 128 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (694 download)

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Download or read book A History of the Last Hundred Days of English Freedom (Classic Reprint) written by William Cobbett and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2018-01-13 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from A History of the Last Hundred Days of English Freedom Once convinced that this was the capital need of the time, Cobbett threw himself into his task with great courage and with all the force of his versatile and exuberant mind. It needed very real courage for a journalist of those days to rewrite the history of the Protestant reforma tion. Religious animosity ran high, and the most honourable men inpolitics were shut out from office for no other reason than their desire to secure a small measure of justice for the Irish Catholics. Cobbett was a Churchman, with no kind of hostility to Protestantism in his early days he had supported the barbarous intolerance of the Protestant ascendancy faction in Ireland. But when he had made up his mind that the accepted version of the reformation masked one of the great usurpa tions of the rich classes, he determined to defy prejudice, and to tell his countrymen what he believed to be the truth. And this general design of his explains not merely his large conception of his task, his idea, for example, of writing an English grammar for the classes who were shut out from the schools by the borough-mongers, but also the iconoclastic methods of his attacks. Historians have described the shock which was given to the mind of Italy by the French methods of warfare, when Charles the Eighth led his armies into her plains, and fought his battles without any of the graceful conventions that were usual among the condottieri, whose amiable habit it had been to lift a fallen officer to his feet. When Cobbett descended on the reform agitation, his methods of controversy were not less startling to his contemporaries. He was by nature the kind of man who hits hard, but there was reason in his Violence. For he wanted to destroy the superstitious esteem enjoyed by the ruling class. He felt that the most serious element in the Situation was not that the ruling class made pretensions that were not founded on its services or its history, but that those pretensions were accepted by the nation. Just as O'connell set himself to destroy the prestige of our odious administration in Ireland by personal attacks on the judges, so Cobbett felt that it was important to get the other classes of English society to shake themselves free from the habit of looking upon one class as sacrosanct. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.