John Morley

Gladstone and his cabinet fought as hard as they could, and for good reasons, against single-handed intervention by Great Britain.

When they saw that order could not be re-established without the exercise of force from without, they insisted that this force should be applied by the Sultan as sovereign of Egypt.

On July 22, he said: “We should not fully discharge our duty, if we did not endeavour to convert the present interior state of Egypt from anarchy and conflict to peace and order.

Every legitimate authority—the Khedive, the Sultan, the notables, and the best men of the country, such as Cherif and Sultan pashas—had been put down, and a situation, of force had been created, which could only be met by force.

The British fleet, lawfully present in the waters of Alexandria, had the right and duty of self-defence.

I feel that in being party to this work I have been a labourer in the cause of peace.

He strives like an athlete all his life long, and then when he comes to the end of his striving, he has what is meet.

Yet when there comes down glory imparted from God, radiant light shines among men and genial days.

Die since we must, wherefore should a man sit idle and nurse in the gloom days of long life without aim, without name?

To what the old world had to say, he added Dante’s majestic commonplace: “You were not to live like brutes, but to pursue virtue and knowledge.”(54) These meditations on the human lot, on the mingling of our great hopes with the implacable…

The moods that in less strenuous natures ended in melancholy, philosophic or poetic, to him were fresh incentives to redeem the time.

Man, he used often to say, is the least comprehensible of creatures, and of men the most incomprehensible are the politicians.

We may, indeed, be sure that neither of these two moods can ever hold a place in the breast of a commanding orator.

But to have laboured within the measure of justice for the Greece of the future, is one of my happiest political recollections, and to have been trained in a partial knowledge of the Greece of the past has largely contributed to whatever…

But I do not scruple to own that he has been in no small degree a help and guide to me; and as to the Queen, whose heart I am sure is at this moment bleeding, I do not believe she can possibly fill his place as a friendly adviser either in…

The recollections of nearly sixty years are upon my mind, and through all that period I have felt more and more the force and value of your husband’s simple and noble character.

But the death of Dean Wellesley is to my wife and me an unexpected and very heavy blow, also to me an irreparable loss.

There may be,” he said, “and must be much diversity as to parts of the opinions of Dean Stanley, but he will be long remembered as one who was capable of the deepest and widest love, and who received it in return.

In accepting an approver you do not incite him to do what is in itself wrong; only his own bad mind can make it wrong to him.

As to removal into the House of Lords, I think the reasons against it of general application are conclusive.

When I came to know him as a colleague, I found reason to admire no less sincerely his superiority to considerations of pecuniary interest, his strong and tenacious sense of the dignity of his office, and his thoroughly frank, resolute…

As for myself, I can in no way understand how it is that for a full half century I have been permitted and enabled to resist a pressure of special liabilities attaching to my path of life, to which so many have given way.

I do not think that this state of facts can have been due to the absence of cases entitled to consideration, and I am quite certain that it is not to be accounted for by what are commonly termed party motives.

It was obvious to me that I could not create a precedent of deviation from a course undeviatingly pursued by my predecessors of all parties, without satisfying myself that a new form of proceeding would be reasonable and safe.

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