16 MARCH 1934, Page 17

* * * One feels that this book is the

real Cobbett. In his own elaborate explanations and excuses he condemns himself. But he reveals, too, his essential honesty, his courage and his large devotion to the improvement of the poor and oppressed. Cobbett means to most of us the Rural Rides. It is salutary to be made to realize by this autobiography that a great part of his writing was directly political. He realized that his real enemy was the Industrial Revolution, and that the still unsolved problem involved in it, then in the making, was the destruction of the peasantry. He would have been more effective had he stood on this solid ground and not rushed out to tilt at every ineptitude of a doomed system of government.