All this was material enough to make a popular ideal, and this is what Gordon in an ever-increasing degree became, to the immense inconvenience of the statesmen, otherwise so sensible and wary, who had now improvidently let the genie forth from the jar.
Morley discusses how Gordon became a popular ideal, complicating the decisions of pragmatic statesmen.
Share
More from John Morley
What I wish to insist upon is, not that that system was good, but that the statesman who undertook to overthrow it, should have had something to put in its place.
What I endeavoured to show was that King George III., without changing his opinion of the justice of his war against the colonies, was obliged to give it up on account of a change of public opinion, and was not open to blame for so doing.
But the Poet Laureate has written his own song on the hearts of his countrymen that can never die.
But Turgot was one of those severe and scrupulous souls, to whom a wicked promise does not cease to be degrading by becoming hypocritical.
Other voices in this conversation
