William Connor Magee Quotes
It would be better that England should be free than that England should be compulsorily sober.
William Connor Magee, 1821-1891, British Cleric and Member of the House of Lords, Archbishop of York, Speech, House of Lords, May 2, 1872
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This quotation has frequently been used by opponents of government regulation of alcohol and other drugs.
Douglass had written of how the slave owners used alcohol to maintain control over the slaves: {611086}.
Suggestions of prohibition of alcohol have been made for a long time in America. It was tried for a few years in he early 20th century. Instead, alcohol is regulated in most parts of America.
American Founding Fathers were not the first to realize that freedom that depended on government was not very safe. It is highly likely that a number of them had read Ferguson. But they together with the public pressure for a Bill of Rights were the first to build a structure that would be based on the assumption that government alone could not be trusted as the guarantor and provider of freedom and rights.
Although English, Cobett spent time in America and published a newspaper, The Porcupine Gazette, in Philadelphia. We was very conservative and even proposed legally enslaving the lazy poor. One of the reasons that he spent time in America was that he thought that England had become hopelessy democratic but thought there might be hope for America. Cobbett and his paper represented the extreme right wing fringe of the then Federalist Party. His Porcupine Gazette had a paying readership of 3,200, the largest circulation of any American daily newspaper.
The authenticity of this quotation has been in contention for years. While many sources attributed this statement to Lincoln, no one has ever found a document in which it appears. Further, it was so clearly consonant with the anti-Prohibition argument that we suspected it as a “Phantom Quotation” (See http://politicalquotes.org/node/4063). As a result, we did not include this quotation until March of 2014. The reason we changed our mind was a newspaper article that was pointed out to us, and after reading it, we tilted in favor of inclusion. The article is http://druglibrary.org/schaffer/LincolnQuote/lpq0001.jpg
William Connor Magee DD DCL was an Irish clergyman of the Anglican church, Bishop of Peterborough 1868–1891 and Archbishop of York for a short period in 1891.
