Political Extracts
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Political Extracts’
Adam Smith contrasted the Government’s handling of the national economy with the way most families handled theirs.
By 1776, the long-standing policy of favouring British producers and blocking overseas competitors had raised prices, cost jobs, and only last year driven the American colonies to revolution. Adam Smith thought it both damaging and insulting, for the humblest tailor or cobbler could have told the Government that this was no way to run a budget.
Richard Cobden told an Edinburgh peace conference that the biggest threat to the United Kingdom’s security was her own foreign policy.
In May 1853, Russia took military action to liberate Christians in Moldavia and Wallachia (modern-day Romania) from Turkey’s harsh rule. In England, the talk was of sending troops to defend poor Turkey, and of Russia’s secret designs on western Europe. That October, Richard Cobden told a peace conference in Edinburgh that our fears and economic hardships were all of our own making.
John Wesley urged the medical profession (and his fellow clergy) to remember that drugs are not the answer to every sickness.
On Saturday May 12th, 1759, John Wesley was in Whitehaven, on the coast of Cumbria. That evening, he left himself a reminder in his daily Journal never to try to get there via the coast road: the inland trip by Kendal and Keswick was longer but quicker. He then fell to musing on a lady he had spoken to recently, who suffered from a persistent stomach ailment.
Sir Philip Francis told the House of Commons that it must not let ministers manufacture crises as an excuse for grabbing more power.
In 1794, Great Britain was braced for an invasion by neighbouring France, and King George III, as hereditary Elector of Hanover, decided that the situation warranted stationing Hanoverian troops in Britain. Sir Philip Francis, among others, demanded to know why the Commons had not been consulted, and was told that in desperate times His Majesty’s Government can take desperate measures.
Sir Bernard Pares warned that after the Great War, Western powers must not assume Germany’s role as supercilious bully.
In 1916, Sir Bernard Pares looked ahead cautiously to the end of the Great War, and to the prospect of an end to Germany’s high-handed economic domination over Russia. Knowing the Russian Emperor Nicholas’s goodwill towards England, Pares urged Prime Minister Herbert Asquith’s government to set an example of restraint, liberty and understanding, and not simply to take the German Empire’s ignoble place.
The Russian Consul in New York issued a stern rebuke to those trying to break Britain’s ban on slave-trading by sailing under his nation’s colours.
Long after slavery was criminalised throughout the British Empire, the abuse went on unabated in the USA. Hoping to escape the wrath of the Royal Navy, traders with their wretched cargo would sail to America under false colours, but on April 2nd, 1836, the Russian Consul in New York, Alexis Eustaphieve (1755-1857), issued this stern Consular notice to any who thus dishonoured the Russian flag.