Reviews for The Better Administration Of The Poor Law (1895)

The average rating for The Better Administration Of The Poor Law (1895) based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-11-08 00:00:00 Rebekah Wellman What can you do once you have completed Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire but still yearn for more? Can any other history survive comparison with its deliberate opinions, its vast scope, its lofty style? Well, it took me twenty years, but I have stumbled upon an answer: you can read Hume's History of England. It ain't the same, my fellow Gibbon lovers, but it's close. David Hume—of course--is not identical to Edward Gibbon. Hume's sentences, not nearly so stately, possess a sharpness all their own. Whereas Gibbon's prose moves more slowly, taking the longer view, like a man walking uphill who observes extensive ruins from increasingly greater heights, Hume's prose moves quickly, like a well-breathed horse, covering many miles of challenging terrain with apparent effortlessness. Whereas Gibbon displays man's follies and vices, leading us to the peace of philosophical resignation, Hume anatomizes the oppressions of the state that precipitate those follies and vices, and by so doing instils in us a renewed passion for liberty, the benefactor of mankind. But the two historians share much as well. Both abhor superstition, particularly when it is united to policy, and are equally forceful in their denunciations of political leaders who—seduced by private desires or a lust for public power—derange the operations of the state. This volume is the first chronologically considered, but the last to be published. (It was issued in 1761, a full fifteen years before the first volume of Gibbon.) It covers the period from the initial conquest of Julius Caesar, through the long reign of the Conquerer and the fitful careers of his immediate successors, and ends with the accession of Henry II. Hume—ever on the lookout for the heroes and villains of liberty—finds one hero to praise and one villain to condemn. The hero is Alfred the Great, whose unification of England halted the debilitating custom of continual war and minimized the predations of the petty kings and thanes, thus bringing new stability to the yeoman of England. The villain is William the Conqueror, who systematically deprived the Anglo-Saxons of self-governance and damaged their self-respect as he elevated his fellow Norman invaders to a nobility divorced from its country's traditions, a nobility which acknowledged few legitimate restraints. To conclude: fellow lovers of Edward Gibbon, I urge you to give David Hume a try. If you find Hume a slight bit inferior to Gibbon, remember: Hume did it first.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-06-28 00:00:00 Nicole Kiesler This is the best telling of early English history that I’ve come across. Hume gives the facts as he believes them and weaves a narrative that makes for a coherent story as he believes them to be and relevant for his time period of 1760. I found this book and its accounting of its history to parallel Henriech Graetz’s first two volumes of his History of the Jews and his story telling. As these books unfolded it becomes obvious to the reader that the concept of The English or The Jews is a construct that each author have bought in completely as real that they’ve created out of their fictions about themselves in order to give sense to who they are in the time period that they are writing in, 1760 for Hume and 1860 for Graetz. As I was reading this volume, I did a wiki on Anglo-Saxon because of the way Hume was using it seemed to conflate with how he was considering who the English People were and Wiki altered me to the fact that the term only makes sense if the assumption of commonality between Anglo, Saxon, and English people are made through out different historical time periods (yes, it is more complex than what I am saying, but I don’t want to elaborate too much since it’s up to the reader to determine for themselves). It seemed to me that the story Hume was telling was a story of the conquerors be they the early Romans, the Danes, the Anglo-Saxon-Jutes, or finally the Normans, and Hume was conflating the conquered indigenous people with their conquerors and seamlessly conflating the two even though the real story he was telling was the story of the conquerors not the conquered. Graetz does a very similar thing in his first two volumes as he tells his story. I like this book incredibly more than I liked Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. Gibbon makes odd forays into the history of England that really don’t belong into his overall telling of the Romans and while I was reading his book, I couldn’t help but think the story that he was telling was a story about only the rulers and elite that was remote from the actual people who lived in the Roman Empire and how remote most of what he was telling did not relate to the actual people that were within the Roman Empire and who were not the rulers of the Empire. Hume knew how to tell his story such that the English person of his day was discovering who their identity as an individual as part of a nation were and how they were meant to think about themselves. Gibbons dwelt on picayune minutia such as the 30 names of emperors you’ve never heard of in that 60-year time period or was that 60 names of emperors over that 30-year time period? Hume’s book has all of the characteristics that are required for a national epic which first and foremost include who they are as a people, has a hero (Alfred the Great, Richard the Lion-Hearted), and gives a fiction that describes the people as a people both as individuals and as a nation. Hume does that with this book while never entering into Gibbon’s remotely distant presentation from who the people really are or at least who they are becoming. Hume gives an incredibly powerful presentation of a complex period of time by giving a compelling narrative for how a people should think about themselves while never dwelling on the insignificant more than what is necessary for its understanding, and, moreover, this book reads as good or better than any modern history book.