Classic Poem

Having read again in that account-casting
Book of a country's deficit drawn on the line
Where the eighteenth century and the nineteenth hinged,
When the House of Commons adopted Mr. Pitt, to wit,
that MONEY must cease to be Property
ownable as solid gold and silver
and become a Promise
dependable on capricious Credit and Bank
(the book I mean is " Paper against Gold " )
I mused a long time
on the farmer of Botley, the ploughboy of Farnham,
and M.P. for Oldham.

All constitutional safeguards of property and liberty
were abrogated so far as relates to MONEY:
in the place of Magna Carta
the Canon Law
Coke
and the Petition of Right,
like their unsubstanced shadow, Cobbett,
sole check on financial encroachers
and defender of the lawful money of the Realm,
wielded his pen in gaol.

Public Prosecutor in the Court of Right Reason,
he penned the private advantage
taken by the few fraudulently,
convicting them by reference to Gold,
leaving it to a more leisured age
to harness to human need the power of Paper,
but leaving an example and form of account.