Andrew Bisset

“ To minds weary of the constantly recurring spectacle of savage party spirit, rising at times into fury, at other times wearing that degraded form of malignity which has received in England the name of spite—which has been described as in some natures surviving all the other faculties, so as to give rise to the words—"his power gone—his spite immortal—a dead nettle"—there is a singular pleasure in turning to the testimony of the opposite party—of Clarendon, of Johnson, of Hume, to the valour and integrity of Robert Blake. ”

“ It is strange that a people who put down slavery at an immense sacrifice are not able to suppress monopoly, which is but a milder form of the same evil. Under slavery the man was seized and his labour stolen from him, and the profit of it enjoyed by his master and owner. Under Protection the man is apparently free, but is denied the right to exchange the produce of his labour except with his countrymen, who offer him much less for it than the foreigner would give. ”

“ It was indeed sad for France that a man should be able to stamp out her life who certainly could not be reckoned a man of genius in the sense in which the first Bonaparte was a man of genius, and whose daring was to that of the first Bonaparte as the murder of unarmed citizens, and of old men, women and children, was to the first Bonaparte's passage of the Bridge of Lodi, swept by the Austrian artillery, at the head of his grenadiers. ”

“ Where the audience is a single judge, or more than a single judge, or a jury, an adroit advocate may so mould his discourse as to obtain their suffrages. But I do not believe that the most powerful orator that ever appeared upon earth would, though he spoke with the tongue of men and of angels when he asked for an abolition of the bread-tax, get a single vote from a House of Commons or a House of Lords composed of landowners who had prospered as the British landlords had prospered by the high price of corn and the consequent rise of rents. ”

“ When great genius and daring and energy go together, no wonder if a nation bear with the dominion of such a man, and even submit for a time to the dominion of those who only inherit his name. But to inherit or assume a name is not to inherit the genius which made that name famous, is not to inherit the mind, which gave dominion over mankind. ”

“ Are you not aware that the French are as civilized as ourselves. Have you forgotten that they have passed through a great social revolution, which has equalized property, abolished privileges, and converted the mass of the people into thrifty and industrious men, to whom war is hateful, and the conscription detestable? ”

“ For James Mill might see where Thompson was wrong, but either did not see, or did not admit that he saw, when he was right, whereas John Stuart Mill, while he shows wherein he considers the author of the pamphlet wrong, does him ample justice in the criticism of his "Catechism on the Corn Laws." It is in this quality of trying to do justice to all men, by patient investigation and incessant labour, that John Stuart Mill stands alone among all the men that have come under my observation in the course of my life. ”

“ The village Hampden and the mute inglorious Milton, if they ever lived the village life out of Gray's "Elegy," lived and died as unheard of and as unrecorded as if they had never been. There have undoubtedly been men who though born peasants have succeeded in climbing "the steep where Fame's proud temple shines afar." But the mass did not thereby emerge from its lot of poverty and toil. For they are particularly deprived of that power of combined action which is within the power of the artisans of some degree of cultivated intelligence, collected in considerable numbers in towns. ”

“ It is one of the greatest advantages of a free country, with a free Parliament, and a free press, to protect great men, as you call them, against themselves. Some of the greatest men that ever lived. Napoleon Bonaparte, for instance, have gone to destruction because they were without such protection. As for these small tyrants, such as your landlord here, you see what monkey tricks they play when left to themselves. ”

“ As your representative, I take the opportunity to point out to the Hull Reform Association, and through it to every association of the same nature throughout the country, the insulting falsehood contained in asserting that you, or any other set of electors, have freedom of election. You are free to elect whom you please, under the understanding that he shall be mulcted in his personal property to any extent the adversaries may choose to effect by the expenditure of perhaps a much inferior sum of their own. ”

“ The courtiers, in the great struggle for liberty, laughed and jeered at the eloquence of the talking members of the Commons' House of Parliament. The landowners, in the struggle for freedom of trade, did not drive their view of the question between them and the Free-traders so far as the King did his view of the question between him and the Parliament; for as the battles of Marston Moor and Naseby settled the question of the divine right of Kings, the pecuniary resources of Lancashire, rendered more formidable by the Irish Famine, settled the question of the divine right of squires. ”

“ In a subsequent chapter I shall have to touch on the question of the influence of Free Trade on foreign policy. Those who look only to a larger market for their manufactures are very apt to fall into traps, such as that of the Channel Tunnel — the trap of drawing a nation which nature has placed in an insular situation out of that advantageous position, and placing that nation on a level with the nations which had not that advantage, only to put money into the pockets of certain speculators who use the words "free trade" to serve their passion for speculation. ”

“ Yet it has been remarked by those who have long observed closely the working of political machinery, that great powers of speech united to small powers of judgment are the curse of free governments. The man who is fitted to give the best counsel in a difficult crisis is almost never the man fitted to take the lead in a debating society or in a tumultuous assembly of any kind. ”

“ Now your farmer is forbidden to trade with the Englishman, and must give to an American double the quantity of grain and lour for many articles he is constantly requiring that he would give if your laws did not forbid his trade with England. A country may have democratic institutions, its government may be Republican, and based on a wide suffrage, and yet there may be no freedom to men for that which is the source of life and comfort. If a man's labour is not free, the man is not free. ”

“ I don't say a word in defence of his worship of such heroes as Claverhouse—a man whom I don't even much admire as a soldier—and who, in every other respect, can only be an object of detestation for his tyranny and cruelty—cowardly cruelty too, in order to establish the despotism of such despicable tyrants as Charles the Second and his brother James. ”

“ I have heard them in my youth from a naked savage, in the indignant character of a prince surrounded by his subjects, addressing the governor of a British colony, holding in his hands a bundle of sticks, as the notes of his unlettered eloquence—'Who is it,' said the jealous ruler over the desert encroached upon by the restless foot of English adventurers, 'who is it that causes this river to rise in the high mountains, and to empty itself into the ocean? Who is it that causes to blow the loud winds of winter, and that calms them again in the summer? ”

“ As soon as the monarchy of Louis Philippe was succeeded by the short-lived republic, we have seen that, instead of an effusion of brotherly love together with liberty, equality, and universal philanthropy, one of the first schemes of the philanthropic republic was an invasion of England. Of course a railway projector who sees, or fancies he sees, enormous profits in a Channel Tunnel, shuts his eyes to all other consequences of his Tunnel. ”

“ Speculating traders think of nothing but filling their pockets. But there are other things to be thought of besides raising the dividends of railway companies, when the price of the rise may be a nation's ruin. A glance at the map will show that if the English Channel be filled up, London will be within an easier distance of Paris than Berlin, and when the cry of "to London" shall arise, as in 1870 the cry "to Berlin" arose, England may not have the good fortune to have such a general as Moltke, and such an army as Moltke had organized. ”

“ If circumstances had permitted the fashionable morals of the Regency to be continued for some generations, and the lofty pretensions of the men of large rentals to become loftier by the bread-tax being made perpetual, the pride and luxury of the rent-receiving class, like the pride and luxury of the French noblesse, would have gone on advancing in extravagance and audacity till they reached that condition in which words that have been applied to the French noblesse before the Revolution might be applied to them:—"All the old safeguards were broken down, and no new ones created. ”

“ Yet would I not, for the sake of any peace, however fortunate, consent to sacrifice one jot of England's honour. Our honour is inseparably combined with our genuine interest."
The gentlemen of the English Peace Society have not shown in the peace question the logical power which they have shown in other matters. When they want to purchase a commodity, they do not adopt as a mode of obtaining it at a reasonable price a display of extreme anxiety to possess it. ”

“ The husband of the Duchess of Marlborough, who governed Queen Anne, possessed mental qualities of a very different order from those which Buckingham had possessed, a genius for politics not inferior to the genius of Richelieu, a genius for war not inferior to the genius of Turenne. ”

“ As for the Land Tax, it is doubtless a deduction from rent, but one to which the State is entitled; and surely, considering the manner in which the landlords in Parliament have dealt with it since it was imposed, it never can be for their interest to have it discussed or inquired into: no man can learn that history without almost feeling that, as a class, the landowners have proved themselves utterly unworthy of public trust. ”

“ Therefore, even if the collection of the suffrages had been carried on with perfect fairness, the mere stress of the question proposed would have made it impossible that there should be a free election: the same central power which, nearly four years before, had compelled the terrified nation to pretend that it loved a republic, would have now forced the same helpless people to kneel, and say they chose for their one only lawgiver the man recommended to them by Monsieur de Morny. ”

“ If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake posterity, that they will be content to be stationary long before necessity compels them to it. ”

“ The Englishman would not have gone so far in the expression of his opinions, for he was always careful not to say unnecessarily what might hurt the feelings of any person unless such person, by having been the aggressor, rendered an attack on him a mere act of self-defence; but he saw that the worthy minister, though he might consider it his duty to speak of the great land-holder with a certain guarded tone of respect, was greatly displeased at the destruction of his own and his parishioners' crops by the landlord's game, and by the unfeeling manner in which redress was refused. ”

“ Eloquence is not more capable of being taught than poetry. It is as true of the orator as of the poet, that he must be born not made; and the votes and verdicts gained by studying Demosthenes and Cicero may be classed with the battles won by lessons of tactics and strategics, and the epic poems written by the rules of criticism. ”

“ If the "rich dullard" should chance to be a man like the younger William Pitt, and the " poor man of intellect" a man like Charles Montague, the rich dullard is very much preferable as a member of Parliament to the poor man of intellect. ”

“ How can it be a question, Sir, when in those days the poor people were little if any better than benighted heathens, without either preaching or teaching that had the smallest savour of the true Gospel, or the pure unadulterated Word of God in it? ”

“ When a Goverment publishes what the French Government put forth in its Enquête Parlementaire of 1849-50, I do not think we are guilty of infringing the comity of nations in calling this insolence. There is a monarchical insolence and a republican insolence. This is republican insolence, and I think it exceeds monarchical insolence in offensiveness. If Russia were to come under republican government, a Russian republic would probably be a worse neighbour than a Russian Czar. ”

“ England had, in fact, in this disgraceful reign sunk so low that her ambassadors were repeatedly insulted at foreign courts, her merchant ships could not sail the sea in safety, and her coasts were ravaged by the Barbary pirates, who plundered the villages and carried off many hundreds of the inhabitants into slavery.
No man ever engaged in the court intrigues of that king's reign and escaped with life and honour ”

“ And whether the law which enacts this restriction be the offspring of republican or autocratic government and power, it is equally evil to be condemned and withstood by all who love freedom and understand what it is. ”