Favourites
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Favourites’
John Buchan warned that the great figures of history are often beyond their biographers’ comprehension.
John Buchan had little time for the kind of historian who makes a career out of rubbishing reputations, pulling the great (if flawed) figures of history down from their pedestals in the hope of some scattered applause from his peers. Some giants of history are quite simply too big for their critics.
John Bright MP urged a critic of the British Raj to offer India more than fine words.
In 1883, Major Thomas Evans Bell, a former employee of the East India Company and a severe critic of the British Raj, was preparing for a lecturing tour in the United States. John Bright MP (who was not uncritical himself) wrote to remind him that what India needed most from Britain and America was not colonial guilt or blame, but free trade.
Human beings should not be frantic cogs spinning away in the Government’s factory of Progress.
John Buchan contrasted his view of society, as a delicate ecosystem of living plants suited to a particular climate and soil, with the economic abstractions of political experts in Germany and the Soviet Union, for whom people were mere cogs and pistons in the pounding machine of Government.
John Buchan draws a distinction between political changes brought by violence and those brought by progress.
John Buchan’s historical research and long experience in Government led him to believe that revolutions achieved little. Political betterment, he argued, comes not from violent overthrow by small, ideologically-driven groups of activists but from the natural wasting away of repression owing to popular dislike.
Richard Cobden asked Parliament to make a better effort to understand the Russian mindset.
Back in 1801, Napoleon almost persuaded Tsar Paul I to invade India. Further lobbying fell on deaf ears but many in London still believed Russia was poised to invade India, and even Western Europe. After pre-emptive wars in Afghanistan (1838-42) and the Crimea (1853-56), Richard Cobden urged Westminster to get to know Russia better.
Richard Cobden despaired at British statesmen using the peerless Royal Navy merely to strangle trade in other countries.
The Victorian era saw Britain abandon its colonial ‘single market’ in favour of much greater free trade, but Richard Cobden was not yet satisfied. He urged Parliament to stop using the navy to blockade the ports of its commercial and political rivals – in modern terms, to stop imposing sanctions and punitive tariffs.