democratic principle Quotes
See Walter Reynolds {32317} for a later English version. Also, Alcuin of York {593018} and William Tecumseh Sherman for an opposite view using a similar phrase. Hesiod's seems to be the earliest version of this idea that is with us today.
See Charles James Fox, John Milton, Jeremy Bentham, Grover Cleveland, Henry Clay, Benjamin Disraeli and Woodrow Wilson for similar expressions of this idea.
It was his message about the possibilities about the atomic bomb that Albert Einstein transmitted to FDR, leading to American development of the bomb.
This was a dramatic assertion at the time, even for England with it’s Magna Carta.
The speech was never actually delivered, but instead the Bishop published it. It received wide distribution including in America where it was published by the Maryland Gazette on September 29, 1774.
The view was considered so radical at the time that Fox's name was erased from the Privy Council.
Executed by the English for his part in the Easter Uprising.
Although Queen Victoria was modern and liberal in many respects, the idea of self-determination by majority vote was unthinkable and certainly undesirable for her. She was not opposed to lands and peoples changing empires and peoples per se. It was how the decision was made that was critical to her. Sovereigns had been buying, selling, and trading lands and peoples for centuries. And after wars, the winners would also reallocate the kingdoms of the loser. But the idea of a democratic plebiscite making the decision was unacceptable. To her and many others of the day, power struggles between factions, politicians, and sovereigns themselves would cause them to inflame the passions of the people and/or bribe the people to vote to change their allegiance. She saw popular but possibly unscrupulous politicians “blackmailing” kings and queens and if payments from the treasury would not be made, the politician would stir up a movement to transfer allegiance to another sovereign who might well be willing to pay.
