Word: whig
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...trouble lay in the rigidity of their principles. Educated Englishmen, Whig or Tory, believed in laissez faire, the classic economic theory of a free economy. But this mercantile theory led to absurdities when applied to Ireland's pre-mercantile economy. "The fanatical faith ... in the operation of natural causes," says Woodham-Smith, "was carried to such a length that in the midst of one of the major famines of history, the government was perpetually nervous of being too good to Ireland and of corrupting the Irish people by kindness, and so stifling the virtues of self-reliance and industry...
Because of the age-old influence of the United States on Canadian polities, Conway contrasted the development of the two systems. "The United States," said Conway, "was an expression in the New World of the Liberal-Whig tradition in British politics, whereas Canada expressed the Conservative-Tory strain...
Laissez-Faire Marriage. William Lamb, Lord Melbourne, was born to aristocratic ease. He belonged to the great Whig dynasty, whose members "took on the task of directing England's destinies with the same self-confident vigour that they drank and diced." Lamb was never certain who his father was because, as he put it, his mother "was not chaste." But he grew up with a sense of security in his close-knit, comfortable family, early developed a spirit of reasonableness. He fled his first fistfight at Eton with no sense of shame: "If I found I could not lick...
...first, Melbourne dabbled reluctantly in politics. He much preferred books and parties. But at 51, after several torpid years in Parliament, he was brought into a Whig Cabinet as Home Secretary. He snapped out of his indolence by harshly putting down hunger riots in the south of England. "I like what is tranquil and stable,'' he announced, and achieved tranquillity by hanging several of the leaders. He scoffed at earnest middle-class reformers, once received a group of them lounging on his sofa. While they talked, he pulled a feather out of a pillow, began to blow...
Three Canadian newspapers-the Toronto, Ont., Globe and Mail, the Kingston, Ont., Whig-Standard and the Regina, Sask., Leader-Post-dropped the pig-goat sequence. (As a substitute the Globe and Mail reprised a Pogo swampland series from the 1940s.) In the U.S., the Toledo Blade temporarily killed Kelly. And in Tokyo, the English language Asahi Evening News, having run the sequence for 11 days, agreed to drop the rest of it after a protest from the Soviet embassy...