‘Never Trust Experts’
Lord Salisbury seeks to calm the Viceroy of India’s nerves in the face of anti-Russian hysteria.
1877
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
Lord Salisbury seeks to calm the Viceroy of India’s nerves in the face of anti-Russian hysteria.
1877
Queen Victoria 1837-1901
In 1877, military advisers urged Britain to ready themselves for war against the Russian Empire, citing St Petersburg’s diplomatic ties with Afghanistan, and warning that the Russians ‘could’ invade Turkey or even India. Lord Salisbury, Secretary of State for India, wrote to the Viceroy, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, urging calm.
AS to our foreign policy I hardly dare to open the subject with you. If I took your gloomy view I should commence immediate enquiries as to the most painless form of suicide.
But I think you listen too much to the soldiers. No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.*
* As a maxim, ‘never trust experts’ does have its limitations, as the vestry of St Chad’s Church in Shrewsbury found when they invited surveyor Thomas Telford to provide an estimate for mending their leaky roof in 1788. See A False Economy.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
According to Salisbury, what do doctors generally advise?
That everything carries some risk to health.