Character and Conduct
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Character and Conduct’
Jack Curran’s career as a defender of victims of political prejudice got off to a stuttering start.
John Philpot Curran (1750-1817) was a eloquent campaigner for civil rights in Ireland, then governed from London. Small, ungainly and plagued by a stammer, Curran overcame his inhibitions and impediments by a strenuous regimen of reading aloud, behaviour changes and mental rehearsal that transformed him into a fluent speaker, a clear thinker and a persuasive advocate.
Statesmen promise to make the country a better place, but they never mention the one thing that would do some good.
In Self-Help; with Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance (1859), Scottish motivational writer Samuel Smiles attempted to stir ordinary citizens to self-improvement. He put very little faith in condescending speeches by well-heeled politicians promising to better the lot of the working classes. If the working man needed anything doing, he had better do it himself.
Samuel Smiles warned that taking care of the pennies should not come before taking care of living.
Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859), like his later book Thrift (1875), urged readers to economise. He was not advocating penny-pinching, or becoming Ebenezer Scrooge. To him, thrift or economy was not really about saving money: it was about allocating money to things that matter, rather than things that don’t.
‘Alpha of the Plough’ wished that he had been born with the gift of a winning smile.
For many years, newspaper editor AG Gardiner wrote short essays for the Star under the pseudonym ‘Alpha of the Plough’. The following passage is taken from a reflection on the value of the smile, a reflection that ended with a warning. “Smiles,” he wrote, “like poets, are born, not made.”
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.