Talk:John Bellers

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Untitled[edit]

I've just removed the following passage from the article:

Bellers saw independent peasants as a hindrance to his plan of forcing poor people into prison-factories, where they would live, work and produce a profit of 45% for aristocratic owners: "Our Forests and great Commons (make the Poor that are upon them too much like the Indians) being a hindrance to Industry, and are Nurseries of Idleness and Insolence." ^[1]

I've done this for several reasons: 1 - The entire sentence /out/ of quotation marks is lifted from the website given as a reference for the Bellers quotation. 2 - The quotation from Bellers does not support the claim made about him. I don't think "prison-factories" is a fair characterisation of his project, and I don't think it's actually correct that he planned to /force/ the poor into his "college of industry". I also am unsure about the claim that he foresaw 45% profit for the owners, and about the claim that the owners would be aristocratic (rather than, say, bourgeois like himself). Bellers is calling forests and commons a hindrance to industry (i.e. industriousness), but the article author attributes to him the (different!) view that independent peasants are hindrances to his plan.

Solution to (1): I think we should rewrite the sentence so we're not plagiarising. Solution to (2): There may be good textual evidence for some or all the claims I have issue with -- I just think we should quote and/or cite this evidence. If anyone wants to reinstate the claims (rewriting so we're not plagiarising), I suggest we at least cite support from the text itself so we're not simply relying on the authority of the author of the cited article. (After all, the article is not primarily about John Bellers -- the two sentences that have made it to our page are in fact the only two sentences on Bellers in the article.) — Preceding unsigned comment added by FrenchieAlexandre (talk • contribs) 15:35, 2 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

References

^ http://exiledonline.com/recovered-economic-history-everyone-but-an-idiot-knows-that-the-lower-classes-must-be-kept-poor-or-they-will-never-be-industrious/

[1] ttp://exiledonline.com/recovered-economic-history-everyone-but-an-idiot-knows-that-the-lower-classes-must-be-kept-poor-or-they-will-never-be-industrious/

[1]