The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Edmund Burke expressed his frustration at the arrogance of politicians who have no regard for our Constitutional heritage.
As France descended into chaos and bloodshed in the unhappy revolution of 1789, Edmund Burke urged his fellow MPs to examine their responsibilities. An English statesman is entrusted by the People with helping them to make their country better, and they want neither the statesman who is too timid to change anything, nor the statesman who is so arrogant as to smash everything up.
French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville visited the USA in the 1830s, and found a degree of contentment that he rarely found in Europe.
Alexis De Tocqueville went to the USA in 1831, to see for himself how the former colony’s experiment in Constitutional liberty, now almost fifty years old, was working out. His own experience in Europe was that no government could hold back the destructive forces of democracy once they had been unleashed, but he found that in America some of those forces were kept under restraints stronger than any law.
In the Great War, the Japanese were among Britain’s allies, and the Japanese cherry was a symbol of the courage demanded by the times.
In 1915, Britain entered the second year of what later proved to have been the most appalling and wasteful war in human history. Joseph Longford, former Consul in Nagasaki and from 1903 the first Professor of Japanese at King’s College in London, contributed an essay to a series on ‘The Spirit of the Allied Nations’ in which he spoke of the Japanese cherry tree as a symbol of sacrifice.
Joseph Longford described how Japan had changed from the day he first joined the Japan Consular Service to the day he retired as Consul in Nagasaki.
From 1869 to 1902, Joseph Longford served in the Japan Consular Service, and retired after six years as Consul in Nagasaki to become the first Professor of Japanese at King’s College in London. During that time he witnessed the transformation of Japan from feudal backwater to bustling industrial society, but as the Great War moved into its second year he was glad that the nation’s fighting spirit was as strong as ever.
In 1932, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his accession, the Jam Sahib brought vanished days back to Nawanagar with a lavish hand.
In 1932, Colonel His Highness Shri Sir Ranjitsinhji, Jam Sahib of Nawanagar (Jamnagar), celebrated his Silver Jubilee. Lord Irwin, the outgoing Viceroy, had pushed hard for democracy and efficiency, and the Jam Sahib had overseen the development of a modern and prosperous State. But the man remembered by English cricket fans as the swashbuckling ‘Ranji’ showed he was an Indian prince too.
Ann Sancho would be in better health, said her husband, if she did not worry quite so much about him.
Several years after his death, some letters of Ignatius Sancho, a grocer trading from King Charles Street in London and a former slave, were presented to the public in the hope of demonstrating that he was a writer quite as accomplished as many a native English literary man. In this extract, dated October 24th, 1777, he talks (as he often does) about his wife Ann.