How To Reclaim The Streets

IN THE OLD days, we all know, adults used to correct children who misbehaved. They corrected their own children and they corrected other peoples’ children. In public.

But in our day, this ancient practice has become controversial. Partly it is because all men approaching children are assumed to be sexual predators, and partly it is, as Theodore Dalrymple writes in the London Spectator, that many

parents regard their children as being inherently beyond reproach and will, for example, take the side of their children in any disciplinary dispute with a teacher or other person in authority.

The result is the response of three 10-year-olds to Lord Phillips of Sudbury, who reproved them for cycling on the sidewalk in Sudbury, England. As Boris Johnson relates, the young sprigs did not respond respectfully to Lord Phillips attempt at correction.

The 10-year-olds shrieked at the noble lord, who has been married since 1968 and who has three children. They called him a "pervert, a poofter and a paedo".

When one of these little innocents knocked Lord Phillips’ bicycle to the ground he was moved to respond.

He asked a passer-by to call the police, saying to the child: "If you think you can behave like this, you are dead wrong." To which, the boy replied, with a chilling grasp of the changed relationship between children and adults: "I am going to have you for holding me."

When the police arrived they reproved the noble lord for attempting to exercise authority in any way.

There is the problem of modern youthful misbehavior in a nutshell. If we are to reclaim the streets there cannot be the slightest doubt in the mind of a young sprig that any adult has the right to correct him for misbehavior. And there cannot be the slightest doubt that ordinary citizens have the power, police or no, to arrest troublemakers.

When modern government restrains citizens from keeping the peace it is wrong, dead wrong.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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