He opposed the remedy of a Place Bill for the good and sufficient reason that it gave the executive an interest against the legislature.
Harold J. Laski
The Public Record
Harold Joseph Laski was an English political theorist and economist. He was active in politics and served as the chairman of the British Labour Party from 1945 to 1946 and was a professor at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1950. He first promoted pluralism by emphasising the importance of local voluntary communities such as trade unions. After 1930, he began to emphasize the need for a workers' revolution, which he hinted might be violent. Laski's position angered Labour leaders who promised a nonviolent democratic transformation. Laski's position on democracy-threatening violence came under further attack from Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the 1945 UK general election, and the Labour Party had to disavow Laski, its own chairman.
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He was against the demand for shorter Parliaments on the excellent ground that the elections would be more corrupt and the Commons less responsible.
He supported almost with passion the ending of that iniquitous system by which the enfranchisement of revenue officers gave government a corrupt reservoir of electoral support.
Prudence is not only first in rank of the virtues political and moral, but she is the director, the regulator, the standard of them all." Nor did he hesitate to draw the obvious conclusion.
Nothing was more alien from Burke's temper than deductive thinking in politics.
He had no doubt that property was a rightful index to power; and to disturb prescription seemed to him the opening of the flood gates.
While he did not belittle the value of reason, he was always impressed by the immense part played by prejudice in the determination of policy.
Political philosophy was nothing for him but accurate generalization from experience; and he held the presumption to be against novelty.
It was easy to destroy; creation was impossible.
Its problem was not to secure dividends but to accomplish moral benefit.
He denied that the government of subject races can be regarded as a commercial transaction.
He knew that cruelty abroad is the parent of a later cruelty at home.
But there has never, in any language, been drawn a clearer picture of the danger implicit in imperial adventure.
The consequences of their conduct, which in good minds (and many of theirs are probably such) might produce penitence or amendment, are unable to pursue the rapidity of their flight.
The English youth in India drink the intoxicating draught of authority and dominion before their heads are able to bear it, and as they are full grown in fortune long before they are ripe in principle, neither nature nor reason have any…
The European must respect the powers and rights of the Hindu as he would be compelled by law to respect them in his own State.
A lie was a lie whether its victim be black or white.
All that he insisted upon was this, that in imperial adventure the conquering race must abide by a moral code.
He did not ask the abandonment of British dominion in India, though he may have doubted the wisdom of its conquest.
He was the first English statesman fully to understand the moral import of the problem of subject races; and if he did not make impossible the Joseph Sedleys of the future, at least he flung an eternal challenge to their malignant…
There is nothing more noble in Burke's career than his long attempt to mitigate the evils of Company rule in India.
Yet they were denied a share in the commonwealth.
Why is the Irish Catholic to have less justice than the Catholic of Quebec or the Indian Mohammedan?
How could it seek security where it defied the desires of the vast majority of its subjects?
A government which defied the fundamental impulses of men was bound to court disaster.
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