Hair by Hair
Governments must not use ‘the good of society’ as an excuse to run our lives.
1803
King George III 1760-1820
Lemuel Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians.
By Donaldson Brothers, Five Points, NY, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
A trade card for cotton bobbins made by American firm JS Coats, dating from 1875-1900. It shows Lemuel Gulliver, hero of Jonathan Swift’s political satire Gulliver’s Travels, waking up to find that the tiny people of Lilliput have pinned him down very securely with hundreds of threads. Cobbett applied the story, as Swift would certainly have wished him to do, to totalitarianism. He was wary of vaccination, but no worse; his much more serious concern was the logic that says a Government may force itself into every corner of the human breast if it deems it vital ‘for the public good’. Where does that logic end?
Introduction
In 1803, William Wilberforce threw his weight behind compuslory vaccination for smallpox, declaring that those who refused it were endangering society. William Cobbett replied with an open letter, in which he wondered whether any Government could resist applying the same logic to every habit, preference or opinion they could label as a social menace.
I like not this never-ending recurrence to Acts of Parliament.* Something must be left, and something ought to be left, to the sense and reason and morality and religion of the people.* There are a set of well-meaning men in the country who would pass laws for the regulating and restraining of every feeling of the human breast, and every motion of the human frame:* they would bind us down hair by hair as the Liliputians did Gulliver, till anon when we awoke from our sleep we should wonder by whom we had been enslaved. But I trust, Sir, that Parliament is not and never will be so far under the influence of these minute and meddling politicians as to be induced to pass laws for taking out of a man’s hands the management of his household, the choice of his physician, and the care of the health of his children; for under this sort of domiciliary thraldom, to talk of the liberty of the country would be the most cruel mockery wherewith an humble and subjected people were ever insulted.
From the January 22nd-29th edition of