petition in his hand. In the metropolis itself an attempt was made to take the Tower by a mob led on by a young fanatic.
Cobbett's writings became the most popular reading of the country. In nearly every cottage in the manufacturing districts of South Lancashire, of Leicester, Derby, and Nottingham, as well as in similar districts in Scotland, he was looked up to as an oracle. Soon after he was set at liberty he commenced to publish his Weekly Register in the form of a twopenny weekly pamphlet, that he might bring his writings within the reach of the great body of the people. He laboured to convince his countrymen that it was not machinery, but misgovernment, that had been the cause of all their misery, and that to reform Parliament was the only way to effect an alteration.
Clubs were formed to bring this about; the agitation gradually took form, and Cobbett was regarded by the people as one of the most trusted of their leaders.
The Government were much alarmed at the reappearance of the Revolution, which they supposed finally crushed by the battle of Waterloo and the treaty of Vienna. Breaking of frames had already been made a hanging matter; now they induced Parliament to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act, and pass the celebrated "Six Acts."
These laws put a most effectual gag on the liberty of the press, since newspaper writers henceforth became liable to transportation if found guilty of seditious libel. Still more, they enabled the Government to suppress anything like public agitation for Parliamentary Reform, since they expressly forbade any cooperation or correspondence for the purpose of amending the Constitution.
Cobbett considered these new laws were levelled mainly at him; he was moreover involved in a whirlpool of difficulties, the result of his two years' imprisonment. So a few days before the "Six Acts" became law he set sail once again for America.
This time he went to Long Island, and took a farm at North Hampstead. But although he had crossed the Atlantic, he did not relinquish his Weekly Register, It had reached the enormous sale, for those days, of 50,000 copies. He continued now to write the paper in Long Island, just as he had formerly written it
