John Morley: “The ideal is as impracticable as it is puerile and retrograde.”

We ought to be able to separate in thought the question of the grounds and evidence for a given dogma being true, from the distinct and purely historic question of the social and intellectual conditions which made men accept it for true.

Fitness is henceforth to be the criterion of eligibility.

But Turgot was one of those severe and scrupulous souls, to whom a wicked promise does not cease to be degrading by becoming hypocritical.

Could ministers justify abandonment, without far stronger evidence than they then possessed that they could not govern the Transvaal peaceably?