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William Pitt complained that European politics offers only a choice of inhospitable extremes.
In 1793, Prime Minister William Pitt spoke about the French Revolution and the recent assassination of King Louis XVI. He reminded the country how fortunate Britain was to possess a Constitution designed to prevent the country lurching from one extreme politics to another.
The defiant Mrs Partington took on the full might of the Atlantic Ocean.
In 1831, the House of Lords rejected a Bill on the reform of Parliament, sent over from the House of Commons. Sydney Smith was strongly in favour of this Bill, but told a political meeting in Taunton that he was not too worried, as the Lords had set themselves a task even harder than Mrs Partington set herself in 1824. Mrs Partington? Let the Revd Mr Smith explain...
The English ‘Cato’ cautioned that sabre-rattling sanctions and other forms of coercion are never in the country’s economic interest.
The wisdom in the 1720s was that the Government and its wealthy partners should use their superior financial and military resources to shape global trade in the British interest; so they bribed, bullied and bombarded foreign lands and peoples into working for us instead of themselves. Wars spread, debts mounted, and ‘Cato’ wondered what happened to sane men when they joined the Cabinet.
Peoples of another culture or region will not long tolerate a Government that uses guns and soldiers to secure their obedience.
By the 1720s, there were already rumblings of discontent coming from England’s American colonies, but John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon warned against strictness from London. When government of a distant or culturally different people falls to your lot, the only way to keep them on side is to give them a mutually satisfactory degree of freedom and self-determination.
There are solid reasons why countries with lower taxes and less regulation tend to be more prosperous.
Eighteenth-century Britain was by comparison with most of Europe a remarkably free and stable society, and also a driving force behind industrial innovation and economic growth. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon regarded this as cause and effect: countries where government is quiet will be busier, more prosperous and internationally more friendly, and they explained why this will always be so.
The citizen should not dutifully accept government intrusion as the price of community life.
In the early eighteenth century, some argued that those who enjoy the benefits of living in our society should accept that the authorities will police our spending, our behaviour and even our opinions as they think best. But the benefits of society do not come from having our liberties curtailed, objected John Trenchard MP. They come from having them protected.
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.