Liberty and Prosperity
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Liberty and Prosperity’
Our peculiar brand of democracy and liberty is a noble thing, but we should be wary of recommending it to other countries.
Historian Mandell Creighton believed unlike our Continental neighbours, when the English laid down our Constitution we were driven not by ideological purity or a passion for order but by a desire to protect our customs and little oddities. Though this worked well for us, foreign nations had some trouble getting it to work for them — and they were starting to notice it.
Three years before the Great War, Rudyard Kipling recalled how one English king simply paid his bullying neighbours to stay at home.
In the reign of Ethelred the Unready (r. 978-1016) Viking raiders harassed the people of eastern and southern England so cruelly that the King bribed them to stop. In a verse contribution to CRL Fletcher’s A School History of England (1911), Rudyard Kipling drew the moral for any nation listless enough to buy a quiet life.
The Victorian working man had John Bright’s respect and unwavering support, but he could expect no special favours.
On January 28th, 1875, John Bright MP gave a speech in Birmingham during which he regretted the pressure put on voters in manufacturing towns to elect working-class candidates. A Mr Joseph Hulme of Burslem (part of Stoke-on-Trent) wrote to express surprise at this seeming prejudice, drawing the following reply.
Richard Cobden questioned both the wisdom and the motives of politicians who intervene on foreign soil.
At the Vienna Congress in 1815, Napoleon’s former empire was shared out by Britain and other European Powers. A semi-autonomous Kingdom of Poland was allotted to Russia, which Russian troops occupied in response to the November Uprising of 1830-31. Calls grew loud for the British and Turkish Empires to restore ‘the balance of power’, but Richard Cobden heard only arrogant self-preservation.
If Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli really wanted a better-educated public, he must tackle the high cost of living.
As the 1860s progressed, calls grew for a Government shake-up of the education system. But in February 1868, John Bright MP, one of the country’s leading Liberals, told his Birmingham constituents that local communities would handle the three Rs without any help from fancy theories, if Government policy hadn’t made daily living into such a desperate scramble to survive.
Victorian economist Alfred Marshall argued that it was no accident that free societies and coal-powered industries are found together.
In 1878, Alfred Marshall, one of the most influential British economists of his day, looked back over a hundred years of social progress. For some, the French Revolution (1789) was the key, for some the Communist Manifesto (1848). But Marshall believed that what had liberated the people and raised their standard of living to new heights was not political idealism, but coal and steam.