Favourites
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Favourites’
The colourful Foreign Secretary humbly accepted a lesson in manners from a local tradesman.
Charles James Fox (1749-1806) was a larger-than-life statesman in the time of King George III. He supported the revolutionaries of France and America, frequently changed political sides, kept a mistress (whom he secretly married in 1795), gambled to excess, and campaigned against slavery – a maddening blend of rascal and man of honour.
Samuel Smiles explains why the London and Birmingham Railway was an achievement superior to the Great Pyramid of Giza.
When the London and Birmingham Railway opened in 1838, it was an engineering marvel. But progress from the era of the Great Pyramids to Britain’s railways did not lie in engineering alone. It lay in the fact that the industrial revolution was an achievement not of servants gratifying a political elite, but of free men pursuing their own advantages.
Edmund Burke pleaded with Parliament to emerge from behind closed doors and reconnect with the British public.
In 1780, Parliament stood accused of being out of touch. While MPs entertained generous lobbyists and rubber-stamped ever higher taxes, the country was governed by grossly overstaffed committees behind closed doors. Edmund Burke pleaded for a more direct, self-denying government, and urged the Commons to reconnect with the public.
Samuel Smiles reminds us that until we brought the railways to India, we had little to boast about as an imperial power.
Samuel Smiles’s biography of George and Robert Stephenson opens with a heartfelt appreciation of the social and economic progress brought by the railways. He describes how this peculiarly British invention had by the 1870s already reached most European countries and beyond, and of course he could not fail to mention the railways of India.
However obscure a man may apparently be, his example to others inevitably shapes the future of his country.
In his famous ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ Thomas Gray lamented that lives of obscure people blossom only to ‘waste their sweetness on the desert air’. Samuel Smiles, by contrast, used a military analogy to argue that the everyday sacrifices made by ordinary people have far-reaching effects on the country.
Charles Dickens rails at the way Parliament and do-gooders treat the public like an irresponsible child.
In 1855, a Bill to restrict Sunday trading provoked riots in Hyde Park; Charles Dickens hosted his own in ‘Household Words’. His objection was not to Sunday Observance, a venerable Christian custom which he actively encouraged, but to politicians and campaigners who treat the General Public like a helpless child.