John Morley: “An immense loss of dignity in a great crisis of the empire would attend the forcing of our hands by the Irish or…”

True merit once resigned, No trick nor feint will serve as well.

A rendering less apt for this occasion finds favour with some scholars, that true virtue can never be restored to those who have once fallen away from it.

It is a case so to speak of “limited liability.” We are bound in honour—you cannot put a legal construction upon it—to see in concert with others that these arrangements are maintained.

Gladstone protested against the bill as “inequitable, unusual, and unwise,” and it was largely modified in committee.