Arthur Young Quotes
Banishment from court alone will force the French nobility to execute what the English do for pleasure—reside upon and adorn their estates.
Arthur Young, 1741-1820, English Writer and Contemporary Historian, The Example of France a Warning to England, 1793
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At the time the number of small, independent land owners was diminishing.
Louis Napoleon had seized control of France and had very little popular support amongst the aristocracy and middle class. However, the Socialists leading the uprisings frightened them more than Louis Napoleon as the Socialists had the support of the peasants who resented the abuses of the aristocracy and many of the middle class. This was true class warfare and not at all what was possible in the United States when American conservatives would claim “class warfare” when there was a move for more progressive taxation. In Europe, class warfare really meant death and destruction, so for many who knew the history, the claim of “class warfare” was frightening and a large part of the “Red Scare” in the United States.
Chivalry was a set of rules that regulated the behavior of knights especially as to their behavior in battle. It was the Medieval equivalent of the Geneva Convention. At the time knights fought against knights and peasants fought against peasants. After time the fighting was mixed. Previously, if a knight was subdued by other knights, he would surrender and promise to fight any more and that would be honored. But when a small group of peasants brought down a knight in armor, he could not surrender. He had probably killed other lightly armored peasants who were friends, and the peasants did not trust the knights. So typically, the peasants just killed the fallen knight. Social class determined the concepts of honor, fairness, trust, and chivalry came to an end.
In modern America, there are two political views of this notion. The one held by a narrow majority of the population is Trenchard’s quotation taken literally. Their view is that there is no way to maintain liberty if there is too wide a wealth gap between the rich and the rest of the population. The second variant, held by many conservatives, limits the equality to equality of opportunity. They are loathe to take any position that says that any gap between the rich and the remainder of the citizens might be too large. They would particularly disagree with the first sentence of this quotation. Another consideration is that this quotation does not even consider what became a major problem in the American Democracy—the ability and propensity of the very rich to bribe legislators and officials and/or make “campaign contributions” to obtain favorable treatment and/or “access”.
1st Viscount Bolingbroke. See {627799} for the origin of the bias against merchants and money men. It also represents a rigidity of class structure that characterized England until very recently. The landed gentry were the first class citizens. Usually titles went with the land. In America, someone who would be successful as a merchant or a banker could achieve the highest of social status and political influence. This was not true in England where a merchant that was far more wealthy than a landed lord was not accepted by the aristocracy.
The word “proprietor” at the time meant someone who had title to land. The title was then almost always tied up with the aristocratic titles. “Great proprietors” were therefore nobles who owned and controlled large land holdings. The “improvers” tended to be the businessmen—especially the manufacturers and the transportation magnates. Large landowners could just make money by renting parts of their land to tenant farmers. They needed no capital, no vision, not much skill or talent, and they didn’t have to take any risks.
A fief was an estate of land and people. The man who had the title to the fief was obligated to raise troops from his estates and lead then at the command of the King. Women, under English law could not inherit a fief—it went to the oldest son. However, once the military element of fiefdom was eliminated, Johnson saw no reason why women should no longer inherit feifs and the titles that went with them.
3rd Viscount Palmerston. Julius Jacob von Haynau, 1786–1853, was a vicious Austrian General who had committed many atrocities in Italy and Hungary which today would be considered War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity. He even had women publicly flogged who were heard saying anything sympathetic about the freedom fighters who the General suppressed brutally. On a visit to London, he was attacked and beaten by draymen at the Barclay & Perkins brewery, which he was visiting. (When Giuseppe Garibaldi came to England in 1864, he insisted on visiting the brewery to thank "the men who flogged Haynau.") The Austrian government complained to Queen Victoria about his treatment and the quotation is from the Foreign Minister’s letter reporting the facts to the queen. A letter of apology was sent by Temple to Austria, but it was worded in such a way that it was clear that the English government felt that the beating should never have taken place but it was not morally unjustified. This even angered the Austrians more. Haynau was known and despised by military men the world over. See {630983} for an American use of Haynau’s name.
1st Earl of Beaconsfield
Essentially, she was telling all the political forces that they were in the wrong and had to compromise. One could not tell the King, Louis XIV, that he was wrong at that time and place, so she told him that he was poorly advised, but everyone, including the king knew what she meant.
For a conservative this is an amazing position to take because the House of Lords was and is the most conservative institution in Great Britain. However, what makes Salisbury such an effective conservative political thinker is that the mere advantage of having a House of Lords to further the conservative agenda and protect its positions does not offset the principle of having a hereditary group of people—many without merit--with no checks on them by the rest of the body politic. Conservatism ought not support aristocracy but those who have achieved by merit.
Arthur Young was an English writer on agriculture, economics and social statistics. Not himself successful as a farmer, he built on connections and activities as a publicist a substantial reputation as an expert on agricultural improvement. After the French Revolution of 1789, his views on its politics carried weight as an informed observer, and he became an important opponent of British reformers. Young is considered a major English writer on agriculture, although he is best known as a social and political observer. Also read widely were his Tour in Ireland (1780) and Travels in France (1792).
