Giovanni Lucignani

The men who pay wages ought not to be the political masters of those who earn them...

...because laws should be adapted to those who have the heaviest stake in the country, for whom misgovernment means not mortified pride or stinted luxury, but want and pain, and degradation and risk to their own lives and to their children's souls.



John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton, Letters of Lord Acton to Mary, Daughter of the Right Hon. W.E. Gladstone, with an Introductory Memoir by Herbert Paul, Second edition with additional letters (London: Macmillan, 1913). Chapter: LETTERS OF LORD ACTON.

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