William Cobbett Quotes
I view tea drinking as a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an en-genderer of effeminancy and laziness, a debaucher of youth and maker of misery for old age. Thus he makes that miserable progress towards that death which he finds ten or fifteen years sooner than he would have found it if he had made his wife brew beer instead of making tea.
Cobbett, William. Cottage Economy. C. Clement, 1822, p. 25.
Due to a shortage of raw materials in the aftermath of WW I and the economic conditions of the times, the supplies of beer were insufficient and there was a national shortage in May and June.
William Cobbett was an English pamphleteer, journalist, Member of Parliament and farmer born in Farnham, Surrey, one of a popular agrarian faction seeking to reform Parliament, abolish "rotten boroughs", restrain wanton foreign activity and increase wages, to promote domestic peace and ease poverty among farm labourers and smallholders. He backed lower taxes, saving, reversing enclosures of commons and resisting the gold standard of 1821. He sought an end to borough-mongers, sinecurists and "tax-eaters" (overpaid and corrupt bureaucrats, public servants and stockbrokers), and dismissed British Jews in a typecast by the same token. Early in life he was a soldier and devotee of king and country, but later pushed for a radicalism that helped to produce the Reform Act 1832 and gain him one of two seats in Parliament for the newly enfranchised borough of Oldham. He urged Catholic emancipation. He saw British agriculture and other economic output geographically. His polemics cover subjects from political reform to religion. His best known book is Rural Rides (1830, still in print). He argued against Malthusianism that economic betterment could support global population growth.
