Liberty and Prosperity
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Liberty and Prosperity’
A tribute to the postal workers of British India, and to the kind of empire they helped to build.
‘The Overland Mail’ is a tribute to the runners who carried letters across India during the Raj, and in particular the personal and business letters of the Indian Civil Service to which young Englishmen were posted. Among other things, Kipling’s poem is a welcome reminder that by Victoria’s day, the British Empire was increasingly united by trade, services and communications rather than by armies or centralised political will.
Adam Smith warns that politicians are the last people who should lecture the public about how to run their affairs.
Adam Smith, the pioneering Scottish economist, objected very strongly when politicians criticised the public for their spending habits. Private individuals alone actually create wealth, he said. By definition, Governments spend other people’s money and never make a penny in return.
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.
Abbot Elfric expounds a Palm Sunday text to explain how Christianity combines orderly behaviour with intelligent and genuine liberty.
In a sermon for Palm Sunday, Abbot Elfric (955-1010) of the monastery in Eynsham in Oxfordshire drew on the Biblical account of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem to show that Christianity tames the wildness of man not by the bridle of coercion and law, but by the wisdom of reason and freewill.
J. S. Mill argues that free trade has done more to put an end to war than any political union or military alliance.
Many religions and political ideologies promise prosperity and an end to war, but on closer inspection there is a price to pay: all must submit, or be punished. But for Victorian philosopher J. S. Mill, great progress had already been made by sovereign nations sharing trade ungrudgingly – we need only to widen our horizons.
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.