{"id":23181,"date":"2013-12-04T07:44:51","date_gmt":"2013-12-04T12:44:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=23181"},"modified":"2014-12-28T12:25:26","modified_gmt":"2014-12-28T17:25:26","slug":"qotd-a-nation-of-shopkeepers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/12\/04\/qotd-a-nation-of-shopkeepers\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: A nation of shopkeepers"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>When Napoleon called us \u201c<em>une nation de boutiquiers<\/em>\u201d, a nation of shopkeepers, he meant to insult us. Down the centuries, many Continentals have disparaged what they see as the soulless money-grubbing of the English-speaking peoples. Fascists and communists used remarkably similar language when they attacked \u201cdecadent Anglo-Saxon capitalism\u201d \u2014 though, happily for the human race, it turned out not to be in decay at all.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s true that there was always a countervailing Anglophile tendency: Voltaire and Montesquieu, among others, admired us precisely because of our individualistic, mercantile, libertarian ways. But the idea that we \u201cAnglo-Saxons\u201d are too materialistic has never entirely gone away.<\/p>\n<p>The phrase \u201cAnglo-Saxons\u201d, in this sense, is of course economic rather than racial. When the French talk of \u201c<em>les anglo-saxons<\/em>\u201d or the Spanish of \u201c<em>los anglosajones<\/em>,\u201d they don\u2019t mean descendants of \u00c6thelwulf or Oswine. They mean people who speak English and believe in small government, whether in Kowloon, Killarney or Kaukapakapa.<\/p>\n<p>A nation of shopkeepers? Sounds good to me. What would you rather have? A nation of generals? Of civil servants? Of monks? Small employers are the greatest heroes we produce, and their heroism is all the greater for being unappreciated, unacknowledged, unthanked.<\/p>\n<p>Daniel Hannan, <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/danielhannan\/100248855\/a-nation-of-shopkeepers-what-would-you-rather-have\/\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Shopkeepers have done more for human happiness than generals, statesmen or kings &#8220;, <em>Telegraph<\/em><\/a>, 2013-12-03<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When Napoleon called us \u201cune nation de boutiquiers\u201d, a nation of shopkeepers, he meant to insult us. Down the centuries, many Continentals have disparaged what they see as the soulless money-grubbing of the English-speaking peoples. Fascists and communists used remarkably similar language when they attacked \u201cdecadent Anglo-Saxon capitalism\u201d \u2014 though, happily for the human race, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,25,41],"tags":[262,1009,159],"class_list":["post-23181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-economics","category-quotations","tag-culture","tag-napoleon","tag-shopping"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-61T","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23181"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23182,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23181\/revisions\/23182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}