Queen Victoria Quotes
After all we have done to provide the needy with food, the landlords appropriate the people’s corn and use the employment of the poor to improve their properties at public expense.
Millions of people were hungry. There was not enough wheat (they called it corn) to make up for the failed potatoes, and the aristocracy, the landlords, had a very high protective tariff to prevent American wheat from driving the prices down. The aristocrats would not budge on the “corn laws” so Victoria and her government appropriated funds to buy expensive English wheat to distribute to the needy. She also instituted some public employment so the unemployed would, as in the New Deal later, would work on public improvement. However, all administration went through the landlords who took large portions of the corn for the poor to pay themselves for the cost of distributing the corn to the needy. Then many landlords assigned the publicly paid workers to improvement projects on their own personal land. The Queen and Prince were furious and they began an effort that would repeal the Corn Laws and make England a free trading nation.
Victoria Alexandrina, 1819-1901, [Queen Victoria], Queen of Great Britain and Ireland & Empress of India, Letter from Windsor Castle at the time of the potato famine
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
There were few if any consumer protection laws in those days and many wealthy aristocrats made their money by taking advantage of the poor. They were the landowners, bankers, financiers and often the industrialists. Shaw was a sarcastic social critic and this is a typical line he gave his upper class characters. Today, we have more controls on business and finance, and many wealthy business people have gotten that way by providing great value to the consumers and being honest. However, we still have large numbers of wealthy members of society who do make their money from the poor and middle class by unethical and often illegal means. In the aftermath of the Meltdown of 2008. hundreds of thousands of the homes of the working poor and middle class were foreclosed by the major banks forging the legal documentation for the foreclusures. Millions of consumer contracts are issued that even a PhD cannot understand the terms of without special legal and financial training. There is even a legal definition of a salesperson lying to make a sale which is so commonplace that our law excuses it and calls it "puffing". However, there has been over time, improvement over Shaw's era.
Although Fiorello La Guardia proposed an aggressive reform program for New York City, he did not go far enough for some.
Ingersoll was considered to be the greatest orator and political thinker of his day, but his overt atheistic views curtailed his elected political career.
This is one of the great historical quotations. He was, in the 19th century, referring to the past 1000 years of Russian history. The quote has been used many times since then to describe various states and nations and over much shorter periods of time. China and modern North Korea are good examples.
As the son of a former president he fought in both WWI and WWII and was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. See {593105} for another quotation on the poverty of Puerto Rico.
Victoria was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until her death in 1901. Known as the Victorian era, her reign of 63 years and seven months was the longest of any British monarch until surpassed by that of Elizabeth II. It was a period of industrial, political, scientific, and military change within the United Kingdom, and was marked by a great expansion of the British Empire. In 1876, Parliament voted to grant her the additional title of Empress of India.
