In my latest Loonie Politics column I deplore the modern habit of judging budgets by how much boodle we personally pocketed rather than how well or poorly it safeguarded the national finances, as if our own narrow self-interest were self-evidently the national interest.
“I trust it is consistent with my respect both for the talents and the sex of a lady critic who rebuked me in these columns, if I say that her argument is feminine in more ways than one. I mean that she really justified female policemen on the ground that they are not policemen. It is right to add that she does more definitely justify female policemen on the ground that they are females; that they do bring into the police system some of those real superiorities of the female standpoint, about which most civilized men are agreed. Her argument is not that women are fitted to be official, but rather that they are likely to be unofficial. In this argument there is something superficially sympathetic for all of us; but I regard it as none the less dangerous in its deepest effects…. I do not allege that my critic alleges that the lady policemen would arrest anyone she disliked. But I do allege that her argument leads in that direction; that the very atmosphere, of optimistic good nature and opportunist good intention, may involve rather an extension than a limitation of powers in their very nature painful and coercive…. it is as plain as a pike-staff that a free nation is ruled by laws, and a free family cannot be ruled by laws. You cannot draw up a constitution for Mr. and Mrs. Brown and the baby; you cannot enact that the baby shall have a vote, or define exactly when the mother shall have a veto. The Brown Constitution, much more than the British Constitution, must be an unwritten law. But if women mean to extend this domestic rule of thumb to the universal rule of society, it is clear that what is only tact in one place will become treason in the other. And this is the danger that I perceive in the very defense offered for the feminine policeman. The defence substantially suggests that the policewoman will still be a woman; and I am afraid she will. She will have all the vigorous female virtues turned into female vices, by being applied to legal and communal things to which they are not applicable…. In truth the defenders of these official changes misunderstand our objection to them; and industriously make their case worse, when they imagine they are making it better. They try to convince us that the manner of the new official will have the amiability of the amateur and not the strictness of the official. They do not see that, in one who still has the power of the official, the amiability of the amateur is merely the caprice of the sultan. We should prefer a legality that kept within its rights to a laxity that was always invading our rights. Thus my critic says that after all the policeman vanishes, and turns into a mother talking to boys. But I do not like these conjuring tricks happening to a policeman except in a pantomime. I would rather be taken up by a policeman, or even a policewoman, than by a total stranger masquerading as my mother. After all the policewoman has the right to arrest me; especially if I am living under the Matriarchy of the Amazons, as I am willing to assume for the sake of argument. She has no more right to assume my mother’s position, in order to appeal to my emotions, than to put on my mother’s veil and bonnet in order to borrow half a crown. The policewoman only does what she does, and only dares to what she does, because she could at any moment summon the brute force of the constabulary to kick any of her protegés into our detestable jails. Under those circumstances there is nothing of the spontaneous sympathy of a mother, or even of a friend. The pretence is just as repulsive as if an ordinary big blue policeman suddenly embraced us in the street, wept on our necks and swore we were his long-lost brothers; all the time having his whistle and truncheon ready to knock us down, if we did not reciprocate his sentiments.”
G.K. Chesterton “The Policeman as a Mother” in New Witness November 14, 1919 reprinted in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #4 (March/April 2024)
“But when it comes to a fight for private property – you can’t keep women out of that. You can’t have the family farm without the family. You must have Christian marriage again: you can’t have solid small property with all this vagabond polygamy.”
G.K. Chesterton in Tales of the Long Bow, as header quotation on David Beresford in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024)
In my latest National Post column I express hope that Britain’s National Health Service praising cousin marriage to preemptively placate Islamist immigrants will instead represent a positive turning point as regular people simply refuse to tolerate such idiotic disloyalty and cultural suicide any longer.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the idea of putting warning labels on booze is as silly as putting them on lions, and worse.
In my latest Epoch Times column I ask what we, the voters, would like them, the politicians, to do when they think we’re wrong on an issue, pander or debate, because we probably will get what we wish for.
“Rome has had no rival in the art of government. The Roman state committed a thousand political crimes; it built its edifice upon a selfish oligarchy and an obscurantist priesthood; it achieved a democracy of freemen, and then destroyed it with corruption and violence; it exploited its conquests to support a parasitic Italy, which, when it could no longer exploit, collapsed. Here in there, in East and West, it created a desert and called it peace. But amid all this evil it formed a majestic system of law which through nearly all Europe gave security to life and property, incentive and continuity to industry, from the Decemvirs to Napoleon. It molded a government of separated legislative and executive powers whose checks and balances inspired the makers of constitutions as late as revolutionary America and France. For a time it united monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy so successfully as to win the applause of philosophers, historians, subjects, and enemies. It gave municipal institutions, and for a long period municipal freedom, to half a thousand cities. It administered its empire at first with greed and cruelty and then with such tolerance and essential justice that the great realm has never again known a like content. It made the desert blossom with civilization, and atoned for its sins with the miracle of a lasting peace. Today our highest labours seek to revive the Pax Romana for a disordered world.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ
After noting that French Canadians put up passively with the Stamp Act “Carlton had to deal with the problem of the law: the French liked the swiftness and low cost of court access under the French system, but it was a different law, governed by French precedent, which was irritating in itself and practically incomprehensible to the administration in Quebec and difficult to obtain. The substitution of English criminal law had been popular with the public, as it instituted habeas corpus and put an end to the rack and interrogation under torture. London sent legal officers to go back to make a recommendation, and this issue dragged on for a few years, but Carlton became convinced that Quebec needed to devise its own Civil Code, to keep what was familiar, incite pride, and emancipate the province from recourse to French precedents.”
Conrad Black Rise to Greatness: The History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present