Christmas Every Day

1918 Woodrow Wilson Issues His 14 Points

American President Woodrow Wilson had taken his country into the Great War despite having campaigned on a peace platform. Germany’s attempts to incite a Mexican invasion of the U.S.A., and its policy of unrestricted submarine warfare had made it impossible for the United States to remain aloof. In January 1918 Wilson enunciated the issues which he felt were at stake in the war and which would guide the peace treaties. These were the hopelessly idealistic 14 Points which were ignored by Britain and France at the Treaty of Versailles discussions.

I. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.

II. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of international covenants.

III. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance.

IV. Adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.

V. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.

VI. The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing; and, more than a welcome, assistance also of every kind that she may need and may herself desire. The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will, of their comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests, and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy.

VII. Belgium, the whole world will agree, must be evacuated and restored, without any attempt to limit the sovereignty which she enjoys in common with all other free nations. No other single act will serve as this will serve to restore confidence among the nations in the laws which they have themselves set and determined for the government of their relations with one another. Without this healing act the whole structure and validity of international law is forever impaired.

VIII. All French territory should be freed and the invaded portions restored, and the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, should be righted, in order that peace may once more be made secure in the interest of all.

IX. A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.

X. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity of autonomous development.

XI. Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro should be evacuated; occupied territories restored; Serbia accorded free and secure access to the sea; and the relations of the several Balkan states to one another determined by friendly counsel along historically established lines of allegiance and nationality; and international guarantees of the political and economic independence and territorial integrity of the several Balkan states should be entered into.

XII. The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under the Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development, and the Dardanelles should be permanently opened as a free passage to the ships and commerce of all nations under international guarantees.

XIII. An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.

XIV. A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike

1066 Death of Edward the Confessor

The second-last Anglo-Saxon king of England, Edward the Confessor was a strange bird. He was the seventh son of the incompetent Aethelred the Unready and was forced to flee to Normandy when his father lost the throne to a Danish invasion. After the death of his father and brothers, and the marriage of his mother to the Danish ruler Cnut, Edward spent decades in exile on the Continent as the leading Saxon claimant to the throne. When Cnut died, his sons Harthacnut and Harold Harefoot quarrelled over the succession with Edward wisely staying out of reach until his rivals died and he was acclaimed king in 1042.

Edward’s rule was marked by the need for the support of the powerful English earls, particularly Godwin of Wessex. Edward despised Godwin who had murdered Edward’s brother but he married the earl’s daughter and gave his brothers-in-law considerable land holdings and positions of power. In foreign affairs Edward was successful in quelling the ambitions of the Welsh and Scots but he gave up trying to curb the acquisitive Godwin clan. When he died childless, he was immediately succeeded by Harold Godwinson. Harold was challenged by a Viking invasion aided by his brother Tostig; this Harold crushed, only to fall shortly thereafter to an invasion by Normans, led by William the Bastard who claimed that the English throne had been promised to him. William became thereby “the Conqueror” and erased Saxon power in England.

Edward’s most lasting contribution was the commissioning of Westminster Abbey. He was canonised as a saint in 1161, the only English king to be granted that status.

1868 The Meiji Restoration

For centuries the Japanese emperors had been puppet rulers, subject to the oversight of a series of warlords. Since the 1630s these shoguns had been drawn from the Tokugawa dynasty which had followed a policy of isolating Japan from the rest of the world. With the exception of a few Dutch ships allowed to trade at Nagasaki, it was the death penalty for attempting to enter, or leave, the country.

In 1854 an American fleet under Commodore Perry forced Japan to open up to trade with the West. The realization that Europeans and Americans had a vast military and technological advantage over Japan, and the chaotic experience that China was undergoing at the hands of westerners, led elements inside the government to press for an end to the shogunate and a program of modernization.

On this date in 1868 the Meiji Emperor announced that he was resuming power:

The Emperor of Japan announces to the sovereigns of all foreign countries and to their subjects that permission has been granted to the Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu to return the governing power in accordance with his own request. We shall henceforward exercise supreme authority in all the internal and external affairs of the country. Consequently the title of Emperor must be substituted for that of Taikun, in which the treaties have been made. Officers are being appointed by us to the conduct of foreign affairs. It is desirable that the representatives of the treaty powers recognize this announcement.

A brief civil war against traditionalists was necessary to achieve the emperor’s victory but Japan was soon on the way to modernization and world power status.

1809

The curious case of a cask of wine

A case was tried at the end of December 1809, between the crown and Mr. Constable, lord of the manor of Holdernesse, in Yorkshire. It was a struggle who should obtain a cask of wine, thrown ashore on the coast of that particular manor. The lord’s bailiff, and some custom-house officers, hearing of the circumstance, hastened to the spot, striving which should get there first. The officers laid hold of one end of the cask, saying: ‘This belongs to the king.’ The bailiff laid hold of the other end, and claimed it for the lord of the manor. An argumentative dispute arose. The officers declared that it was smuggled, ‘not having paid the port duty.’ The bailiff retorted that he believed the wine to be Madeira, not port. The officers, smiling, said that they meant port of entry, not port wine—a fact that possibly the bailiff knew already, but chose to ignore. The bailiff replied: ‘It has been in no port, it has come by itself on the beach.’ The officers resolved to go for further instructions to the custom-house. But here arose a dilemma: what to do with the cask of wine in the interim  As the bailiff could not very well drink the wine while they were gone, they proposed to place it in a small hut hard by. They did so; but during their absence, the bailiff removed it to the cellar of the lord of the manor. The officers, when they returned, said: ‘ Oh, ho! now we have you; the wine is the king’s now, under any supposition; for it has been removed without a permit.’ To which the bailiff responded: ‘If I had not removed the wine without a permit, the sea would have done so the next tide.’ The attorney-general afterwards filed an information against the lord of the manor; and the case came on at York—on the question whether the bailiff was right in removing the wine without a custom-house “permit”.

The arguments pro and con were very lengthy and very learned; for although the cask of wine could not possibly be worth so much as the costs of the case, each party attached importance to the decision as a precedent. The decision of the court at York was a special verdict, which transferred the case to the court of Exchequer. The judgment finally announced was in favour of the lord of the manor — on the grounds that no permit is required for the removal of wine unless it has paid duty; that wine to be liable to duty, must be imported; that wine cannot be imported by ‘itself, but requires the agency of some one else to do so; and that therefore wine wrecked, having come on shore by itself, or without human volition or intention, was not ‘imported,’ and was not subject to duty, and did not require a permit for its removal.

The trial virtually admitted the right of the lord of the manor to the wine, as having been thrown ashore on his estate; the only question was whether he had forfeited it by the act of his servant in removing it from the spot without a permit from the custom-house officers; and the decision of the court was in his favour on this point. But it proved to be by far the most costly cask of wine he ever possessed; for by a strange arrangement in these Exchequer matters, even though the verdict be with the defendant, he does not get his costs.

1066 Granada Massacre

The occupation of Spain by Muslims during the Middle Ages is said to have produced a brilliant civilization marked by religious tolerance. Though we rightly celebrate the art, architecture and literature of Moorish Andalusia, the story of toleration has definitely been overplayed. The fact is that Jews and Christians under Islamic rule were always considered inferiors and subject to humiliating social and legal disabilities. They were protected, in the public mind, by a pact that reflected this enforced inferiority and when an individual “dhimmi”, or a community of Jews or Christians, seemed to have too much influence there could often be a backlash.

On this date in 1066 mobs of Muslims in Granada, in southern Spain, rose up against their ruler’s Jewish adviser Joseph ibn Naghrela whom they accused of controlling and plotting against their king. They stormed the palace, crucified Joseph on the city’s main gate, and massacred much of the city’s Jewish population. This poem is believed to have inspired the violence and makes clear the resentment felt when one of the inferior races achieves prominence:

Do not consider it a breach of faith to kill them,

the breach of faith would be to let them carry on.

They have violated our covenant with them,

so how can you be held guilty against the violators?

How can they have any pact when we are obscure and they are prominent?

Now we are humble, beside them, as if we were wrong and they were right.

1834

The death of Thomas Malthus

Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) was an English clergyman and political scientist whose theories still generate controversy today. The following is a 19th-century reflection on his life:

This celebrated writer, whose theory on population has been the subject of so much unmerited abuse, was the son of a gentleman of independent fortune, who possessed a small estate in the county of Surrey. Young Malthus received his early education mainly from a private tutor, and subsequently entered Jesus’ College, Cambridge, where he studied for the church, and obtained a fellow-ship in 1797. For a time, he held the incumbency of a small parish in Surrey near his native place.

It was not in the church, however, that Mr. Malthus was to become famous. Through life, the bent of his genius seems to have led him in the direction of political economy and statistics; and in pursuit of information on this subject, he made extensive journeys and inquiries through various countries of Europe. The first edition of the work, which has conferred on him such notoriety, appeared in 1798, under the title of An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other Writers. In subsequent issues, the title of the work was changed to its present form: An Essay on the Principle of Population; or a View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness, with an Inquiry into our Prospects respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils which it occasions.

The leading principle in this work is, that population, when unchecked, doubles itself at the end of every period of twenty-five years, and thus increases, in a geometrical progression, or the ratio of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32; whilst the means of subsistence increases only, in an arithmetical progression, or the ratio of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. The author discusses the question of the various restrictions, physical and moral, which tend to keep population from increasing, and thus prevent it outstripping the means of subsistence in the race of life. A misapprehension of the writer’s views, combined with his apparent tendency to pessimism in the regarding of misery and suffering as the normal condition of humanity, has contributed, notwithstanding the philosophical soundness of many of his theories, to invest the name of Malthus with much opprobrium.

When the common or vulgar impression regarding Mr. Malthus’s celebrated essay is considered, it is surprising to find that the man was one of the most humane and amiable of mortals. His biographer tells us, it would be difficult to overestimate the beauty of his private life and character. His life was:

‘a perpetual flow of enlightened benevolence, contentment, and peace;’ ‘his temper mild and placid, his allowances for others large and considerate, his desires moderate, and his command over his own passions complete.’ ‘No unkind or uncharitable expression respecting any one, either present or absent, ever fell from his lips All the members of his family loved and honoured him; his servants lived with him till their marriage or settlement in life; and the humble and poor within his influence always found him disposed, not only to assist and improve them, but to treat them with kindness and respect’ ‘To his intimate friends, his loss can rarely, if ever, be supplied; there was in him a union of truth, judgment, and warmth of heart, which at once invited confidence, and set at nought all fear of being ridiculed or betrayed. You were always sure of his sympathy; and wherever the case allowed it, his assistance was as prompt and effective as his advice was sound and good.’

Shortly after his marriage in 1805 to Miss Eckersall, Mr. Malthus was appointed professor of modern history and political economy at the East India College at Haileybury, and held this office till his death. He expired on 29^th December 1834, at Bath, at the age of sixty-eight, leaving behind him a son and daughter.

1166 The birth of a very bad king

King John was not a good man / —He had his little ways. / And sometimes no one spoke to him / For days and days and days. So wrote A.A. Milne about a monarch so universally despised that not a single English ruler in the 800 years since his rule has been named John.

John was the youngest son of King Henry II and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, rulers of England, Ireland and most of France: what is today called the Angevin Empire. His was a notoriously quarrelsome family with the sons and mother frequently combining to make war against the father or against each other. John was Henry’s favourite and stayed loyal to him longest but, in the end, he too turned on his aging father, siding with his brother Richard who would shortly inherit the throne.

Richard “Lionheart” became king in 1189 and immediately left on the Third Crusade. John had been bribed to keep him loyal in his brother’s absence but, predictably, he began conspiring with Philip of France who had treacherously returned early from the crusade intending to reduce Richard’s holdings in France. When Richard returned in 1194 he forgave his little brother but died in 1199 without clearly naming him as heir. John had to battle the forces of his nephew Arthur of Brittany before securing the English crown and his possessions in France. Unfortunately John was an incompetent and uninspiring leader who soon lost almost all of his continental holdings, earning the nickname “Softsword”.

Back in England John fared no better, quarrelling with the church and his nobility. He imposed his own candidate as the Archbishop of Canterbury, earning an excommunication from the pope, and alienated his political class with arrogance and greed. He was forced to accept the pope’s candidate for archbishop, turn England over as a papal fief, and sign the Magna Carta with his barons, promising in this founding constitutional document, to rule fairly or face a justified rebellion.

John died of dysentery in 1216, unwept, unhonoured and, mostly, unsung. With the exception of the 16th century when John was treated as a Protestant hero for having defied the pope, John’s historical reputation remained abysmally low.

1946

Premiere of It’s A Wonderful Life

“Merry Christmas, you beautiful old savings and loan!  Merry Christmas, you beautiful beat-up old house!” So shouts George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) who has just been saved from suicide by an apprentice angel who convinces him of the value that his life has had by showing what the town of Bedford Falls would have looked like without his influence.

Philip Van Doren Stern wrote a short story called “The Greatest Gift” but could not interest any publisher in his work so he printed up the story as a Christmas card and sent it to 200 friends. Among the recipients was a Hollywood agent who convinced RKO studio that it would make a great movie. And it did. It was shown in theatres under the title It’s a Wonderful Life for the first time on this date in 1946.

This enormously popular Christmas-time movie was not a success when it was first released in 1946 and when its copyright expired in 1974 no one bothered to renew it, allowing television stations to broadcast it without charge. This allowed new generations to discover this finely-crafted Frank Capra film which also featured Donna Reed as Mary Bailey, Lionel Barrymore as nasty Mr. Potter and Ward Bond and Frank Faylen as the original Bert and Ernie. (Republic Entertainment assumed control of the copyright in 1993 and broadcast fees are once again in effect.) Remakes of the film include It Happened One Christmas and Merry Christmas, George Bailey.

1833 First performance of the new Russian national anthem

Composed by Alexei Lvov, lyrics by court poet Vasily Zhukovsky, this song was the anthem of the Russian empire until the overthrow of the Romanovs in 1917.

God save the Tsar!

Strong, sovereign,

Reign for glory, For our glory!

Reign to foes’ fear,

Orthodox Tsar.

God, save the Tsar!

Though the words are less-than-inspired, the music was quoted several times by Tchaikovsky, including in “The 1812 Overture”, Glinka, Gounod, and in the score to the film Dr Zhivago. A number of American institutions haved used the tune. It is the alma mater song of Macalester College, in St Paul, Minnesota, titled “Dear Old Macalester”.  The deathless lyrics of the latter are:

Dear Old Macalester, ever the same 
to those whose hearts are thrilled 
by thy dear name. 
Cherished by all thy sons 
loved by all thy daughters, 
Hail, hail to thee 
our college dear. 

Macalester students have an unofficial song which they are pleased to sing at sports matches against any of the local Christian colleges:

Drink blood!/ Smoke crack!/ Worship Satan!/ Go Mac!

1773 The Boston Tea Party

Relations between some of the British colonies in North America and the home country were getting a tad antsy by 1773. Tax-averse Americans were reluctant to pay for their own defense in the absence of representation in the UK Parliament. They wished, against British wishes, to penetrate the lands held by native tribes and they objected to the freedom of religion and social customs which had been permitted in the colony of Quebec. Violence and thuggery was the response of some of the more high-spirited American lads. Colonial officials were attacked, ships and homes burnt, and in December the focus was on obstructing the importation of tea from Britain.

The mercantilist system of economics employed by most European powers in the 18th century regarded colonies as territories to be exploited for the benefit of the metropolis. For example, colonies were forbidden to trade directly with other nations and all shipping had to be done by domestic carriers. In the case of America, colonists found it cheaper to resort to some goods, such as tea, smuggled in from non-British sources. However, when the British Tea Act worked to lower the price of legally imported tea, the colonists were outraged. Those merchants who had made a tidy living smuggling now found themselves undercut — greed and nativism combined to prompt action.

At a protest meeting chaired by John Adams, a breakaway group of vandals, calling themselves the Sons of Liberty, disguised themselves as Mohawks, boarded tea-laden vessels in Boston Harbour and dumped the valuable cargo into the water. Adams professed himself in awe of this deed:

This is the most magnificent Movement of all. There is a Dignity, a Majesty, a Sublimity, in this last Effort of the Patriots, that I greatly admire. The People should never rise, without doing something to be remembered—something notable And striking. This Destruction of the Tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible, and it must have so important Consequences, and so lasting, that I cant but consider it as an Epocha in History.

The British responded with a series of coercive measures that sped the outbreak of the American War of Independence and coffee rose to replace tea as the freedom-lover’s beverage of choice.