A. E. Housman Quotes
The average man, if he meddles with criticism at all, is a conservative critic.
Housman, A. E. The Confines of Criticism. Cambridge University Press, 1969, p. 29.
The Republicans had been badly beaten in the 2012 Presidential Election. Many attributed the loss to the dissatisfaction of the electorate with the Republican ideas which had become more and more conservative in recent decades. Others, like Rubio, wanted to maintain the existing ideas which were very different from the Republican ideas earlier when they won more elections.
Democracy and a republican form of government ran counter to the Chinese customs and failed, with Yuan Shikai taking all power—the “immemorial custom” of the autocratic Mancho and earlier Chinese dynasties. This failure of republican government in China so colored the future Chinese political leadership that both the Communists and Chang’s Kuomintang Nationalist anti-communists were both dictatorial and autocratic with great power lying in military hands. It was only in the later years of the 20th century that the Nationalists began to have a real democracy and although the Communists became avid capitalists and loosened up in terms of economic freedom, they did not feel the Chinese masses were ready to accept anything but the authoritarian political system that was the Chinese “immemorial custom”. They would not risk another collapse of modern government and all the factions fighting for control as in the Republic failure.
Alfred Edward Housman, usually known as A. E. Housman, was an English classical scholar and poet. His cycle of poems, A Shropshire Lad wistfully evoke the dooms and disappointments of youth in the English countryside. Their simplicity and distinctive imagery appealed strongly to Edwardian taste, and to many early 20th-century English composers both before and after the First World War. Through their song-settings, the poems became closely associated with that era, and with Shropshire itself.
