William Harrison Quotes
There is no commonwealth at this day in Europe wherein there is not great store of poor people, and those necessarily to be relieved by the wealthier sort, which otherwise would starve and come to utter confusion. With us the poor is commonly divided into three sorts, so that some are poor by impotence, as the fatherless child, the aged, blind, and lame, and the diseased person that is judged to be incurable; the second are poor by casualty, as the wounded soldier, the decayed householder, and the sick person visited with grievous and painful diseases; the third consisteth of thriftless poor, as the rioter that hath consumed all, the vagabond that will abide nowhere, but runneth up and down from place to place (as it were seeking work and finding none), and finally the rogue and the strumpet, which are not possible to be divided in sunder, but run to and fro over all the realm, chiefly keeping the champaign soils in summer to avoid the scorching heat, and the woodland grounds in winter to eschew the blustering winds.
William Harrison, 1534-1593, English Contemporary Historian, Description of England, 1577
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This quotation is significant in that it tells us the methods of coping with poverty—the early American form of a social safety net.
This was quite unusual at the time when Kings were more interested in buying the loyalty and support of the rich and powerful nobles.
Gregory the Great. “Emoluments” included the income from all lands and other church property, gifts and tithes, and income of any sort. This formula characterized the division of resources for the better part of Christian history. By today’s standard, the proportion for these Bishops (there were those who chose poverty) and his household seems astoundingly high—his income and sustenance was the equal of all the priests in the bishopric. It illustrates the affluence of the bishops who were major forces in their territories. One of the rationales for such an affluent bishop (the assets were not all personal but he had control of them) was that he should be at least the equal of any in the area including kings and nobles for he was to have as much influence as they. It is difficult today to look at modern bishops and realize how their role, power, relative wealth, and influence has changed. Bishops had their own armies, judiciary, accountants, attorneys and were a government unto themselves.
In this particular injunction the Queen actually proscribes the amount of church revenues that MUST be distributed to the poor. See {617526} where actual prayers are proscribed by the government.
Whether or not our USAID officials are tough on a bureaucracy or a government unfortunately has had little to do with whether they had used to money for services to the poor, but how the nation voted in support of the United States in the UN and engaged in other political acts perceived by the State Department and the Administration to be favorable to the United States.
The founder was Charles E. Coughlin, 1891-1979, a demagogic Catholic Priest who drafted the principles and invited others to join him. Hundreds of thousands did in this organization which began in idealism, and ended in scandal and hate mongering, so much so that Father Coughlin was ordered off the radio and out of politics by the Catholic Church. The National Union in 1936 had morphed into the Union Party which ran Presidential candidates in the 1936 election.
Just before Christmas, 1991, the Salt Lake City Council overrode the mayor's veto of a bill that could send tenants to jail for not paying their rent.
William Harrison was an English clergyman, whose Description of England was produced as part of the publishing venture of a group of London stationers who produced Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles (1577 and 1587). His contribution to Holinshed's work drew heavily on the earlier work of John Leland.
