History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘History’
The citizen should not dutifully accept government intrusion as the price of community life.
In the early eighteenth century, some argued that those who enjoy the benefits of living in our society should accept that the authorities will police our spending, our behaviour and even our opinions as they think best. But the benefits of society do not come from having our liberties curtailed, objected John Trenchard MP. They come from having them protected.
Peter the Great wanted Russia to join the nations of Western Europe, but the nations of Western Europe refused to make room for him.
On the eve of the Great Northern War (1700-1721), most Europeans saw Russia only as an uncouth land useful as a supplier of wax, hemp and leather goods. Her ambitious new Tsar, Peter I, swore that Germany would soon admire her industry, and France her elegance, and that the Dutch and English would salute her navies; but without a European seaport, all this was an idle dream.
In one of his ‘Cato Letters’, John Trenchard took issue with the view (popular in Westminster) that the public could not be left to make up their own minds.
John Trenchard MP was not so naive as to imagine that the general public were always right. But he thought they owed their errors to being misled by politicians, and that they usually recognised the truth when they were allowed to see it. If only, he sighed, the politicians would stop trying to pull the wool over our eyes, and concentrate on doing the job for which they were elected.
It began to look as if Abraham Thornton might go down for rape and murder, so his attorneys dug deep into their bag of legal tricks.
In August 1817, Abraham Thornton was charged with the rape and murder of pretty and vivacious Mary Ashford. His lawyers cobbled together a shaky alibi, and the jury, not wishing to risk hanging an innocent man, acquitted him. Public outrage prompted the Home Secretary to let Mary’s brother William appeal the decision, and it was then that Thornton’s lawyers made a jaw-dropping application.
The authors of the ‘Cato Letters’ recalled how Greek general Timoleon replied when the people he had saved from oppression turned and bit him.
In one of their ‘Cato Letters’ (1720-23), John Trenchard MP and Thomas Gordon praised Roman Emperors Nerva and Trajan for dismissing the spies and informers hitherto used to gag critics of State policy; and they recalled how Timoleon, the Greek general who toppled dictators for a living, had never felt more proud than when the Opposition slandered him in Parliament.
Joseph Addison tells the legend of the great Greek poetess Sappho and the Lover’s Leap.
Sappho was born in about 612 BC on the island of Mytilene (Lesbos), and became one of the great love poets of ancient Greece. She belonged to an intimate sorority dedicated to Aphrodite and the Muses; she had a daughter named Clëis; and she had three brothers. Few other facts are known. Even the tale of her death is a melodramatic legend; but it has furnished us with the ‘lover’s leap’.