Liberty and Prosperity
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Liberty and Prosperity’
In one of his ‘Cato Letters’, John Trenchard took issue with the view (popular in Westminster) that the public could not be left to make up their own minds.
John Trenchard MP was not so naive as to imagine that the general public were always right. But he thought they owed their errors to being misled by politicians, and that they usually recognised the truth when they were allowed to see it. If only, he sighed, the politicians would stop trying to pull the wool over our eyes, and concentrate on doing the job for which they were elected.
It began to look as if Abraham Thornton might go down for rape and murder, so his attorneys dug deep into their bag of legal tricks.
In August 1817, Abraham Thornton was charged with the rape and murder of pretty and vivacious Mary Ashford. His lawyers cobbled together a shaky alibi, and the jury, not wishing to risk hanging an innocent man, acquitted him. Public outrage prompted the Home Secretary to let Mary’s brother William appeal the decision, and it was then that Thornton’s lawyers made a jaw-dropping application.
The authors of the ‘Cato Letters’ recalled how Greek general Timoleon replied when the people he had saved from oppression turned and bit him.
In one of their ‘Cato Letters’ (1720-23), John Trenchard MP and Thomas Gordon praised Roman Emperors Nerva and Trajan for dismissing the spies and informers hitherto used to gag critics of State policy; and they recalled how Timoleon, the Greek general who toppled dictators for a living, had never felt more proud than when the Opposition slandered him in Parliament.
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.
When farmhand and lay preacher George Loveless was convicted of conspiracy, both charge and sentence made the country gasp.
In October 1833, after his wages had been slashed almost by half, George Loveless of Tolpuddle in Dorset, a farm labourer and father of five, formed a Friendly Society to support struggling families and to remind employers of their moral obligations. The following March, George and five others found themselves up before the Bench in Dorchester under the obscure Unlawful Oaths Act (1797).
In 1844, Daniel O’Connell was hauled before a Dublin court to answer charges of seditious conspiracy, and he didn’t stand a chance.
In February 1844, Robert Peel’s Tory Party succeeded in getting Daniel O’Connell MP, the outspoken but peaceful Irish rights activist, convicted by a Dublin jury on eleven charges of ‘seditious conspiracy’. That May, O’Connell was sentenced to a year in gaol; but four months later the sentence was quashed by the House of Lords, in a landmark decision for jury trials throughout the United Kingdom.