Anyway, FFF has this link in their biographies section to a story from FEE about John Bright:
John Bright: Voice of Victorian Liberalism
Published in The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty - August 1988
by Nicholas Elliott
I like this section:
Before 1867, only 16 per cent of British adult males had the right to vote. In the 1860s, Bright led a vigorous campaign for full manhood suffrage, secret ballots, and equal representation for industrial cities like Birmingham and Manchester.
He rested his case upon two principles. First, since working people must pay taxes and bear the impact of legislation, they should also have a voice in government. Second, he expressed faith in the decision-making ability of ordinary people. A frequent claim of reactionary conservatives was that common people are incapable of making important decisions. Bright reversed this and argued that progress had been achieved only by enforcing working class opinion. He was somewhat naive in supposing that a mass franchise would lead to low taxes, free trade, and a non-interventionist foreign policy.
The People are sheeple, the masses are asses and in the end, every government rests on what the People allow, based on what they "know." GOOD education is the key, not this obedience training our kids are herded through. They need to know how to discern the truth. But in the end the people are more to be trusted than any politicians.
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