John Morley

Gladstone thought it his duty to advise the House to beware of entangling itself in difficulties possibly of a serious character, by assuming a jurisdiction in cases of this class.

He read in it only a witness to the dangers of the course on which the House has entered, and to its unfitness for the office which it has rashly chosen to assume.” He might also have read in it, if he had liked, the exquisite delight of…

Imposing, lofty, persuasive, sage it would have been, from whatever lips it might have fallen; it was signal indeed as coming from one so fervid, so definite, so unfaltering in a faith of his own, one who had started from the opposite pole…

If it be true of a writer that the best style is that which most directly flows from living qualities in the writer’s own mind and is a pattern of their actual working, so is the same thing to be said of oratory.

My proposition is that the line thus drawn is worthless, and that much on your side of the line is as objectionable as the atheism on the other.

If you call upon us to make distinctions, let them at least be rational; I do not say let them be Christian distinctions, but let them be rational.

But all these impressions of sublime feeling and strong reasoning were soon effaced by honest bigotry, by narrow and selfish calculation, by flat cowardice.

So soon in these affairs, as the world has long ago found out, do bodies of men forget in a day of power the maxims that they held sacred and inviolable in days when they were weak.

That being so, it ought not to be considered a settled question merely because annexation had taken place; and if we should find that the balance of advantage was in favour of the restoration of independence, no false sense of dignity…

But we assured the Boers that we would take the earliest opportunity of granting to them the freest and most complete local institutions compatible with the welfare of South Africa.

Yet I am not prepared, for myself, to concede that we made a mistake in not advising a revocation of the annexation when we came in.

They were confident that one day or another, by the mercy of the Lord, the reins of the imperial government would be entrusted again to men who look out for the honour and glory of England, not by acts of injustice and crushing force, but…

We believe that this liberty may be most easily and promptly conceded to the Transvaal, as a member of a South African confederation.” Solemn and deliberate as this sounds, no step whatever was effectively taken towards conferring this…

It was precisely these results that flowed from the denial of independence.

Seldom has the sovereign been made the mouthpiece of an utterance more shortsighted.

Gladstone has always urged, and still feels, that the proposal of the Boers for the appointment of commissioners was fortunate on this among other grounds, that it involved a recognition of your Majesty’s de facto authority in the…

The galling argument was that government had conceded to three defeats what they had refused to ten times as many petitions, memorials, remonstrances; and we had given to men with arms in their hands what we refused to their peaceful…

How could the miscarriage at Majuba, brought on by our own action, warrant us in drawing back from an engagement already deliberately proffered?

Would not such a proceeding, asked Lord Kimberley, have been little short of an act of bad faith?

Gladstone’s language, to say to the Boers, “Although we might have treated with you before these military miscarriages, we cannot do so now, until we offer up a certain number of victims in expiation of the blood that has been shed.

Until that has been done, the very things which we believed before to be reasonable, which we were ready to discuss with you, we refuse to discuss now, and we must wait until Moloch has been appeased”?

We had opened a door for negotiation; were we to close it again, because a handful of our forces had rashly seized a post they could not hold?

The action of the Boers had been defensive of the status quo, for if we had established ourselves on Majuba, their camp at Laing’s Nek would have been untenable.

If you determine, he said, to hold by the annexation of the Transvaal, the country would have to be conquered and held in subjection for many years by a large force.

I would use my best endeavours to make these States independent in matters of administration.