The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
A man begs the mighty Heracles to save him the effort of despatching a flea.
Like the Fable of Heracles and the Waggoner, this is a tale about doing all you can before asking for help. Sir Roger L’Estrange, however, took it further. Mindful of the secularism gaining ground in English society, he said the story was a warning to those who give up on religion when trivial matters do not go their way.
A scrawny wolf listens enviously as a well-fed dog describes the comforts of home, but a flat patch of fur on the dog’s neck worries him.
Many Aesop’s Fables tell of a Wolf and a Dog, and many of them also address the question of liberty and the value we place on it. In this story, hunger has driven a sorry-looking Wolf to work for his keep, but he has not lost his wits and his sharp little eyes spot something that calls for an explanation.
Heracles refuses to come to the aid of man who is perfectly able to help himself.
This little tale has popularised the expression ‘put one’s shoulder to the wheel.’ A waggoner gets into difficulties, and begs heavenly help. All right and proper so far, said Sir Roger l’Estrange, but it wouldn’t do any harm to give it a push too...
John Adams, the second President of the USA, told army officers in Massachusetts that the Constitution he had helped to draw up could not guarantee them liberty.
On October 11th, 1798, President John Adams told officers of a Massachusetts militia brigade that the United States’ historic Constitution (which he had helped to write) was never about centralised Power. Unlike politicians over in Europe, he said, he would not promise to conjure up order out of a selfish, thoughtless and pleasure-seeking society.
Events in Italy and Austria seemed to be bringing the day ever closer when a European democracy would vote herself into oblivion.
The United Kingdom is not a simple democracy; she is a democratic and parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Just as well, thought Irish historian and Unionist MP William Lecky. The kind of democracy they had on the Continent pandered to grievance groups, extremists and slick campaign strategists, and he feared it would soon become a screen for dictatorship.
As William Lecky watched the rapid spread of socialism across the European Continent, he was struck by a powerful sense of déjà vu.
For William Lecky, a contemporary of Karl Marx, ‘Socialism’ meant a politics in which the things that were properly the responsibility of individuals and families were snatched away and dictated by the supposedly wiser Government. Such a politics, he said, was no different to the tyrannies of the past; it merely replaced the arrogance of king or sultan with the arrogance of the politburo.