Political Extracts
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Political Extracts’
To Napoleon, the way that politicians in Paris had forced metric measurements on the public was a lesson in bad government.
Napoleon Bonaparte’s frustration at the way that metres and kilos were forced on the people of France following the Revolution of 1789 has often been quoted with grim amusement by those who lament the passing of yards and ounces. And yet the lesson he was teaching us has rarely been taken to heart, either by his critics or his admirers, though it applies in so many areas of our common life.
The great French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte protested that in calling England ‘a nation of shopkeepers’ he had paid us a compliment.
‘The English are a nation of shopkeepers’ intoned Napoleon Bonaparte, offending many English politicians including Viscount Castlereagh, Foreign Secretary from 1812 to 1822. But as the great General, by now exiled on the island of St Helena, told his personal physician Dr O’Meara, he had meant it as a compliment. The English, he said, should stop trying to be French.
After a visit to England in 1847, Aleksey Khomyakov published his impressions of our country and our people in a Moscow magazine.
Russian landowner Aleksey Khomyakov (1804-1860) paid a visit to England in 1847. He subsequently sent a letter to a Moscow journal in which he relayed his impressions of England and the English, at a time when relations between the two countries were strained over Afghanistan and Turkey. In 1895, John Birkbeck summarised Khomyakov’s commentary for those who knew no Russian.
An unemployed French labourer was amazed when a friend suggested becoming a French master to refined English ladies.
Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help; with Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance (1859, 1866) was a book suited to a time of social change. For centuries, the elite had dictated a man’s trade and harvested most of the fruits of his labour, but the Industrial Revolution was changing all that. Smiles gave an example of just what was now possible in a free country.
A runaway slave is recaptured, and charged with ingratitude by the master who has taken such pains to afford him economic security.
Between 1792 and 1796, John Aikin and his sister Anna Barbauld published a series of children’s stories titled ‘Evenings at Home.’ Among them was an imaginary dialogue in which a plantation owner accused a slave of ingratitude for running away. It is relevant not only to the history of Abolition but also to that politics which promises cradle-to-grave security in exchange for letting an elite shape our world.
Norman Leys complained that policymakers in Africa were interested more in training loyal and industrious workers than in nurturing free peoples.
In 1924, Dr Norman Leys (1875-1944) recorded his alarm at the direction that schools were taking in Kenya (then part of British East Africa), where chiefs’ sons were being indoctrinated for colonial government and everyone else trained for maximum productivity. But an Englishman’s prized liberties, he said, had not come from toiling in the State’s anthills; they had come from wandering in the fields of great literature.