Character and Conduct
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Character and Conduct’
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.
A prophet-for-hire agreed to help Balak, King of Moab, try to do something about the flood of Israelites pouring into his kingdom.
The story of Balaam and his ass, told in the Book of Numbers, is set in the late thirteenth century BC, some forty years after the Israelites escaped slavery in Egypt. Now they were massing in Moab on the eastern side of the Dead Sea, ready to cross the River Jordan into their Promised Land; but Balak, King of Moab, was feeling far from hospitable and already had a plan for moving them on.
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.
Edmund Burke explained to the Duke of Bedford that in politics there is very great difference between change and reform.
In 1789, the leaders of the French Revolution promised liberty, equality and fraternity to the downtrodden people of France, and Francis Russell (1765-1802), 5th Duke of Bedford, admired them for it. But Edmund Burke warned him that to France’s new elite, righting the wrongs of the poor was infinitely less exciting than the chance to conduct a relentless socio-economic experiment on the peoples of Europe.
Sir Richard Steele reflects on the ingredients in his recipe for the perfect English gentleman.
Sir Richard Steele came home one day after tea with some very pleasant ladies, feeling he had rather let himself down. Respecting his maxim ‘Never contradict or reason with a sprightly female’ he had allowed himself to agree to a definition of a Gentleman that would hardly do outside a ballroom. Now he felt compelled to redeem himself in the pages of The Guardian.
The Israelites crossed over into the Land of Promise, only to find their progress barred by the well-fortified city of Jericho.
In 1300-1250 BC or so, the people of Israel escaped a life of forced labour in Egypt, and fled east and north into the desert. Assured by Moses and his brother Aaron that a land ‘flowing with milk and honey’ awaited them, they endured forty years of wandering before reaching the borders of Canaan. As the brothers had now died, the task of making a home there fell to Joshua.