Benjamin Disraeli Quotes
What, gentlemen, is the first quality which is required in a Second Chamber? Without doubt, independence. What is the best foundation of independence? Without doubt, property.
1st Earl of Beaconsfield. The “Second Chamber referred to the House of Lords—the upper house of the British Parliament. The notion in both England and the United States was that the upper house—the Senate in the US case—should be independent and not easily pressured or influenced by the passions and forces of the time. One believe has been that only the wealthy could be independent since people who were not wealthy would be more easily bribed or pressured by forces in the system like a political party. In England at the time, wealth and property were synonymous. In some notable cases in American politics, wealth leaders were very independent and served the society as a whole. Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy were very wealthy men. So was Abraham Lincoln who had made a great deal of money as a lawyer. Senators and Presidents in America and Members of the House of Lords in England have tended to be much more wealthy than average. Unfortunately, although there were great examples of wealthy independent politicians, many of the upper class have an insensitivity to average people and the poor. Further, they tend to have values and beliefs that are different from most people.
Benjamin Disraeli, 1804-1881, British Prime Minister (Conservative), Speech, Manchester, April 3, 1872
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Muir had spoken at the Convention of Scottish Friends of the People at Edinburgh in 1792. He had advocated election reform allowing all men to vote, not just property owners and was sentenced by Braxfield to the Australian penal colony at Botany Bay. Braxfield expressed the deep distrust the establishment felt even for merchants, traders and others with fungible assets.
President Andrew Johnson had been impeached by the House of Representatives and was being tried in by the Senate. A majority of the Senators voted for conviction but the vote was 1 short of the two-thirds that were needed. Johnson remained in office. These were two of the charges against Johnson. A Century later Presidents commonly did both of these. George W. Bush made reappointment of Senate rejected nominees into an art form but after the Johnson trial, these were never to be considered reasons for impeachment again.
The assumption here is that if a person is dependent on others for employment and subsistence, he/she is not free. Marx and others referred to the working class as “wage slaves”. This was written under the name of Ragnar Redbeard. There are a few scholars who believe that it was written by Jack London, but most credit Desmond.
If the executive can select the legislators, there is really no separation of powers and the checks are only one way—the executive can check the legislature but not the other way around.
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, KG, PC, MP, FRS, was twice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, serving in 1868 and from 1874 to 1880. He was a member of the British Conservative Party and played a central role in the creation of the modern Party, defining its policies and its broad outreach. Disraeli is remembered for his influential voice in world affairs, his political battles with the Liberal Party leader William Ewart Gladstone, and his one-nation conservatism or "Tory democracy". He made the Conservatives the party most identified with the glory and power of the British Empire. He is the only British prime minister to have been of Jewish birth. He was also a novelist, publishing works of fiction even as prime minister.
