Introduction
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 it were the province of Great Britain to administer justice to all the people of the earth — in other words, if God had given us, as a nation, the authority and the power, together with the wisdom and the goodness, sufficient to qualify us to deal forth His vengeance, then should we be called upon in this case to rescue the weak from the hands of their spoilers.
But do we possess these favoured endowments? Are we armed with the powers of Omnipotence: or, on the contrary, can we discover another people rising into strength with a rapidity that threatens inevitably to overshadow us? Again, do we find ourselves to possess the virtue and the wisdom essential to the possession of supreme power; or, on the other hand, have we not at our side, in the wrongs of a portion of our own people, a proof that we can justly lay claim to neither?* [...]
Two wrongs are likely to have been in Cobden’s mind. A cost of living crisis caused by the Government’s economic policies at home and abroad was causing severe hardship for low income families, especially in industrial towns such as Cobden’s Manchester; Cobden’s tireless and ultimately successful campaign for The Repeal of the Corn Laws established his reputation as one of the country’s most eminent Liberals. And in Part II of England, Ireland and America (1835), Cobden stated plainly that London’s treatment of Ireland ‘presented a grosser spectacle of moral and physical debasement than is to be met with in the whole civilised world’, and that it would have drawn forth a humanitarian intervention from us had any other European nation treated one of its subject peoples so.
Précis
Writing in the mid 1830s, Richard Cobden stepped into the debate over Russia’s recent annexation of Congress Poland, saying that the business of meting out justice by humanitarian interventions was all very well, but it required a degree of wisdom and power which might be found in Heaven, but judging by our politicians’ domestic record, definitely not in Westminster. (59 / 60 words)
Writing in the mid 1830s, Richard Cobden stepped into the debate over Russia’s recent annexation of Congress Poland, saying that the business of meting out justice by humanitarian interventions was all very well, but it required a degree of wisdom and power which might be found in Heaven, but judging by our politicians’ domestic record, definitely not in Westminster.
Variations: 1.increase the length of this precis to exactly 65 words. 2.reduce the length of this precis to exactly 55 words. 3.introduce one of the following words into the precis: because, besides, must, or, ought, since, unless, whether.
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