John Morley

You can only govern men by imagination: without imagination they are brutes.... ’Tis by speaking to the soul that you electrify men.—NAPOLEON.

Gladstone’s curious instinct for liberty disclosed to him that here was a case of “a people rightly struggling to be free.” The phrase was mocked and derided then and down to the end of the chapter.

It is the way of the world to suppose that because a given course is best, it must therefore be possible and ought to be simple.

So apt are men in their rough judgments on great disputable things, to mistake a mere impression for a real opinion; and we must patiently admit that the Result—success or failure in the Event—is the most that they have time for, and all…

In England, excitement of the unsound sort that is independent of knowledge, consideration, or deliberation; independent of any weighing of the actual facts and any forecast of latent possibilities, grew more and more vociferous.

Gladstone always professed perplexity in understanding why the violent end of the gallant Cavagnari in Afghanistan, stirred the world so little in comparison with the fate of Gordon.

The answer is that Gordon seized the imagination of England, and seized it on its higher side.

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…

The Soudan is a useless possession; ever was so, and ever will be so.

It was, therefore, and it is, pure sophistry to contend that Gordon’s policy in undertaking his disastrous mission was evacuation but not abandonment.

To say that the Soudanese should be left in the state in which God had placed them, to fight it out among themselves, if they were so minded, is as good a definition of abandonment as can be invented, and this was the whole spirit of the…

The policy itself, as well understood by Gordon as by everybody else, was untouched, and it was: to leave the Soudanese in the state in which God had placed them.

Two things at any rate were clear—one, that Gordon should faithfully adhere to the policy of evacuation and abandonment which he had formally accepted; the other, that the British government should leave him a free hand.

Gordon’s argument for this unhappy proceeding was that, the object of his mission being to get out of the country and leave them to their independence, he could have put no sharper spur into them to make them organise their own government.

Gordon was a hero, and a hero of heroes; but we ought to have known that a hero of heroes is not the proper person to give effect at a distant point, and in most difficult circumstances, to the views of ordinary men.

My own opinion is that it is harder to justify our doing so much to rescue him, than our not doing more.

I am aware that the age is not what we all wish, but I am sure that the only means to check its degeneracy is heartily to concur in whatever is best in our time.—BURKE.

You mean that the new parliament, the first of our democratic constitution, shall begin its difficult and perilous course without the services of a leader who has greater experience and authority than any other man.

You design to withdraw your assistance when most urgently needed, at the moment of most conservative apprehension and most popular excitement.

By the choice of this particular moment for retirement you increase the danger of the critical transition, because nobody stands as you do between the old order of things and the new, or inspires general confidence; and the lieutenants of…

It is in the national interest to reduce the outer signs of change, to bridge the apparent chasm, to maintain the traditional character of the state.

The unavoidable elements of weakness will be largely and voluntarily aggravated by their untimely coincidence with an event which must, at any time, be a blow to the position of England among the Powers.

You alone inspire confidence that what is done for the great masses shall be done with a full sense of economic responsibility....

A divided liberal party and a weak conservative party mean the supremacy of the revolutionary Irish....

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