Favourites
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Favourites’
As Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli stoked fears of Russian aggression, John Bright said that Russia was only threatening when she felt threatened.
In 1879, British politicians were warning that we must occupy Afghanistan to prevent Russia invading India, and that Emperor Alexander II’s military operations in the Balkans were not a liberation but an excuse to sweep across Europe that must be met with force. John Bright watched this escalation with alarm, and urged the Government to make our peace with Russia as we had with France – by trade.
Edmund Burke begged the clergy of England to give us all a break from the twenty-four-hour news cycle.
On November 4th, 1789, not yet five months into the French Revolution, Dr Richard Price delivered a sermon at the Presbyterian Chapel in Old Jewry entitled ‘On the Love of Our Country’, in which he called upon all patriotic Englishmen to support the French rebels as a matter of Christian duty. Writing to a French correspondent, Edmund Burke complained that it was grossly inappropriate.
Edmund Burke would not congratulate the French revolutionaries on their ‘liberty’ until he knew what they would do with it.
In 1789, the French Parliament relieved King Louis XVI of his constitutional privileges, and amidst chaotic scenes proclaimed that henceforth ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ would define their Government. Some believed that France was becoming more like England, and that Louis would be retained to add, like England’s George III, regal pomp to a liberal democracy. Edmund Burke wasn’t convinced.
Edmund Burke tore into the directors of the East India Company, accusing them of doing less for the country than India’s mediaeval conquerors.
In 1783, Edmund Burke urged the House of Commons to strip the East India Company of its administration of India, arguing that the Mughal Emperors and other foreign conquerors had done more for the people than the Company seemed likely to do. His blistering attack on the Company’s record repays reading, as it applies just as well to modern aid programmes, interventions and regime changes.
Edmund Burke told the House of Commons that the American colonies’ refusal to be dictated to by Westminster was the very spirit that had made the Empire great.
In 1766, Parliament truculently reasserted the right to tax and regulate Britain’s thirteen American colonies. The Americans were allowed no MPs in the Commons, but they had many friends, and barely a month before those first shots rang out in Lexington on April 19th, 1775, Edmund Burke warned the Government not to try to crush the manly English spirit that made Americans so independent.
John Bright asked the people of Birmingham to spread the word that a great nation, like any good citizen and neighbour, does not meddle officiously in the affairs of others.
In the 1850s, prevailing opinion in Europe was that peace and prosperity depended on the diplomacy and military interventions of a few exceptional ‘Great Powers’. John Bright MP, however, told his Birmingham constituents that nations had to observe the same humble morality as citizens do. No one likes domineering and meddlesome people, and history shows that there is always a reckoning eventually.