The success of the Puritan Rebellion and the American Revolution was built upon the fact that, in each case, the exercise of power had been a habit of the general population; in the one case in the management of Nonconformist Churches, in…

In each case, a blind government confronted men who knew how to formulate their wants, and to organize their attainment.

The development of the total resources at their disposal is postponed to the preservation of their interest and convenience.

They dwarf the masses that they may the better contemplate the stateliness of their own state.

But that, in the end, always means that the vital power of the people is absent at the moment when it is most required.

There is no method known of confining character and energy and ability to their own ranks.

These, where they emerge in the people, will always seek the means of their satisfaction.

It rose to power largely because there was no room in the leadership of the historic parties for self-made men who had not sought success either as lawyers or as business men.

The result was that the knowledge at the disposal of Liberals and Conservatives, the significant experience upon which they could draw for the making of their policy, was always more narrow than the area of the problems they had to meet.

English Liberalism has suffered eclipse because, broadly speaking, it was unable to discover an industrial philosophy suitable to the wants of the new electorate.

But it never understood either the fact of trade unionism or the philosophy of trade unionism.

It assumed that each of these, given liberation from the special privilege of the ancien régime, had the full means of happiness at his disposal; it accepted, in a word, the principles of Benthamite radicalism as absolute.

But its error was not to see that the community is not merely a mass of discrete individuals.

Jones is not merely Jones, but also a miner, a railwayman, a cotton operative, an engineer.

A philosophy of politics that is to work must find a full place in the state for organized workers to whom freedom in the industrial sphere is, in its fullest implications, as urgent and as imperative as freedom in the sphere of politics…

Built largely on the support of the Nonconformist business man, the interests it understood were essentially his interests; and to recognize the implications of trade unionism, as Keir Hardie and his colleagues did, was to invade the…

When, after the war, the remarkable growth of the Labour Party showed how vast was the decline of the Liberal hold upon the working-classes, the Liberal leaders were driven, by the need of self-preservation, to the invention of industrial…

The assumption was unjustified; and the way lay open for the consolidation by Labour of its growing hold upon the workers.

Liberalism remained a middle-class outlook, admirable in its exposition of basic principle, but incapable of adjusting principle to a medium with which its supporters were largely unacquainted.

For it is significant that in the one realm where depth of feeling was passionate--Irish home rule--events moved rapidly to the test of the sword; and the settlement made was effected by violence and not by reason.

I do not deny that men will long postpone their protest against that absence; there are few wrongs to which men do not become habituated by experience, few, therefore, which, after the long passage of time, they will not be persuaded are…

But such habituation is never permanent; sooner or later someone arises, like the child in the fairy-story, to point out that in fact the emperor is naked.

If attention is drawn to some need which is widely experienced, the denial that the need is real by those who have not experienced it, will not prove effective.

Opponents of Mussolini are not moved by his plea that he thinks only of the well-being of Italy.

Russian working-men have probably been often tempted to the view that their Bolshevik masters mistake Communist dogma for social truth.