In every change of political machinery the reformer promises and expects a new heaven and a new earth; then standing forces of national tradition, character, and institution assert their strength, our millennium lags, and the chilled enthusiast sighs.
Morley critiques the unrealistic expectations reformers have regarding political change.
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But the Poet Laureate has written his own song on the hearts of his countrymen that can never die.
It would be a happy day for the Peace Society that should give the colonies a veto on imperial war.
Could ministers justify abandonment, without far stronger evidence than they then possessed that they could not govern the Transvaal peaceably?
But Turgot was one of those severe and scrupulous souls, to whom a wicked promise does not cease to be degrading by becoming hypocritical.
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