A Rush to Judgment
As a young man, surveyor Thomas Telford was a red-hot political activist who yearned for revolution, but admittedly he had read just one book on the matter.
1791
King George III 1760-1820
As a young man, surveyor Thomas Telford was a red-hot political activist who yearned for revolution, but admittedly he had read just one book on the matter.
1791
King George III 1760-1820
In 1791 Norfolk-born Thomas Paine (lately of the USA), a vocal enthusiast of the French revolution, published a withering denunciation of the British constitution entitled The Rights of Man. Surveyor Thomas Telford, who was living in Shrewsbury Castle as a guest of the local MP, Sir William Pulteney, was swept away by it, and began recommending it to his friends back home in Galloway.
abridged
IN the spring of 1791 the first part of Paine’s ‘Rights of Man’ appeared, and Telford, like many others, read it, and was at once carried away by it. Only a short time before, he had admitted with truth that he knew nothing of politics; but no sooner had he read Paine than he felt completely enlightened. He now suddenly discovered how much reason he and everybody else in England had for being miserable. [...]
If Telford could not offer an opinion on politics before, because he “knew nothing about them,” he had now no such difficulty. Had his advice been asked about the foundations of a bridge, or the security of an arch, he would have read and studied much before giving it; he would have carefully inquired into the chemical qualities of different kinds of lime — into the mechanical principles of weight and resistance, and such like; but he had no such hesitation in giving an opinion about the foundations of a constitution of more than a thousand years’ growth. Here, like other young politicians, with Paine’s book before him, he felt competent to pronounce a decisive judgment at once.