Credit Where It's Due, Plus Quote Of The Day
01/20/2011
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You don't often see an author saying this:

Sean’s Latest for VDare

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This is not the article as I wrote it. But it is a model of hw to edit one of my long screeds into something almost punchy.

/articles/john-stuart-mill-the-bnp-and-the-uks-dying-democracy

It's true that those of us behind the scenes at VDARE.com do a lot of work on these pieces after the writer writes them. (The punchiness is inserted by Peter Brimelow, based on his Thick End Of The Wedge Theory, and the links and citations are generally added by me.)

And that brings me to the quote of the day, which by John Stuart Mill, and is featured in Gabb's piece:

"Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist. The influences which form opinions and decide political acts are different in the different sections of the country. An altogether different set of leaders have the confidence of one part of the country and of another. The same books, newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, do not reach them. One section does not know what opinions, or what instigations, are circulating in another. The same incidents, the same acts, the same system of government, affect them in different ways; and each fears more injury to itself from the other nationalities than from the common arbiter, the state. Their mutual antipathies are generally much stronger than jealousy of the government. That any one of them feels aggrieved by the policy of the common ruler is sufficient to determine another to support that policy. Even if all are aggrieved, none feel that they can rely on the others for fidelity in a joint resistance; the strength of none is sufficient to resist alone, and each may reasonably think that it consults its own advantage most by bidding for the favor of the government against the rest."

On Representative Government,1861

Links were added by VDARE.com, because J. S. Mill didn't know how.
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