Political Extracts
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Political Extracts’
Victorian MP Richard Cobden believed British politicians supporting the slave-owning American South had been led a merry dance.
Richard Cobden MP had considerable sympathy with the Confederate States in the American Civil War of 1861-1865, as he regarded Washington as arrogantly meddlesome and corrupted by big business. But in 1863 he held up a report from the US Congress and told his Rochdale constituents that the South’s politicians had forfeited any right to an Englishman’s goodwill.
Victorian MP Richard Cobden offered a startling analogy for the American Civil War.
Abraham Lincoln’s anti-slavery Republicans won the US general election in 1860, prompting eleven slave-owning southern States to declare independence. Some in Westminster sympathised, saying the national result did not reflect the majority of southern voters – but Richard Cobden was scornful.
John Milton (of ‘Paradise Lost’ fame) urged Parliament not to fall into bad old habits of censorship, whatever their fears may be.
In 1643, early in the Civil War, Parliament passed a law allowing it to censor and license pamphlets, hoping to silence critics. John Milton protested, reminding Parliament that in their campaign against Charles I’s tyranny they themselves had begotten the country’s love of free speech. Would they now take it away, like pagan fathers who slay their newborn child?
Philosopher and social activist John Stuart Mill discusses the most liberating kind of education.
J.S. Mill was educated at home by his eminent father, and the experience was a bruising one. He wished that his father had been more patient, but he was profoundly grateful that, unlike many of his contemporaries, he had not merely been trained to meet conventional school targets, but empowered throughout his life to set his own.
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.