Uncle It’s Salisbury’s 184th birthday: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Robert_Arthur_Talbot_Gascoyne-Cecil,_Vanity_Fair,_1900-12-20.jpg The Salisbury Review was named after him, of course. But if you were to meet these sentences walking toward you in the middle of the Sahara Desert, how many would you attribute to their true source? ‘Not the number of noses, but the magnitude of interests, should furnish the elements by which the proportion of representation should be computed...The classes that represent civilisation, the holders of accumulated capital and accumulated thought have a right to require securities to protect them from being overwhelmed by hordes who have neither knowledge to guide them nor stake in the Commonwealth to control them.’ ‘First-rate men will not canvass mobs; and if they did, the mobs would not elect the first-rate men.’ ‘Political equality is not merely a folly – it is a chimera. It is idle to discuss whether it ought to exist; for, as a matter of fact, it never does. Whatever may be the written text of a Constitution, the multitude always will have leaders among them, and those leaders not selected by themselves. They may set up the pretence of political equality, if they will, and delude themselves with a belief of its existence. But the only consequences will be, that they will have bad leaders instead of good. Every community has natural leaders, to whom, if they are not misled by the insane passion for equality, they will instinctively defer. Always wealth, in some countries by birth, in all intellectual power and culture, mark out the men whom, in a healthy state of feeling, a community looks to undertake its government.’ ‘The perils of change are so great the promise of the most hopeful theories is so often deceptive, that it is frequently the wiser part to uphold the existing state of things, if it can be done, even though, in point of argument, it should be utterly indefensible...Resistance is folly or heroism—a virtue or a vice—in most cases, according to the probabilities there are of its being successful.’ ‘I have for so many years entertained a firm conviction that we were going to the dogs that I have got to be quite accustomed to the expectation.’ ‘The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.’ ‘No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.’ ‘A party whose mission is to live entirely upon the discovery of grievances are apt to manufacture the element upon which they subsist.’ A trickier question – do you agree with any of them? Some of them? None of them? Most of them? All of them? Would you give the same answer tomorrow? Can you be sure?
Posted on: Mon, 03 Feb 2014 09:43:58 +0000
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