John Morley

Sir Robert Walpole had not to contend with like difficulties, and I think his administration should be compared with the early years of Pitt’s, in which way of judging he would come off second, though a man of cool and sagacious judgment…

It is a vile precedent to give away money by remission, and borrow to supply the void; and in the full and chief responsibility for having established this precedent I am involved, not by the budget of February but by the consent of July…

Perhaps I should find it easiest in the work of confession to own my neighbour’s faults, i.e. to dwell upon those strange sins of foreign policy which have happily for the most part been nipped in the bud almost à l’unanimité (yet with…

On the whole when I think of the cabinet, I always go back to Jacob and Esau fighting in their mother’s womb; only here there have been many Jacobs and Esaus, by which I do not mean the sixteen members of the cabinet, but the many and very…

To have been the occasion of the blow to the House of Commons, or as I call it the “gigantic innovation,” will be a grief to me as long as I live; if by wildness and rashness I have been its cause, it will be a much greater grief.

It was a budget of peace, and peace wanted it.

Had we abandoned the bill, I know not how we could have looked in the face those who had acted and invested on the faith of an unbroken practice.

We took the more arduous, but I think the more honourable course for a government to pursue.

But, though reliefs, they were hardly reforms; and experience had shown us that reforms were in fact double and treble reliefs.

My view was, and I stated it, that we ought to provide for this expenditure in a due proportion between direct and indirect taxes.

But I then clearly pointed out that, even with the scale of expenditure they then proposed, we could not abolish the income-tax in 1860.

If I have interpreted you aright, and I hope you will tell me whether I have done so or not, this is all to me exceedingly curious; such are the differences in the opinions of men formed from their different points of view.

The Irish peasant, after suffering centuries of oppression and tyrannic wrong, at last got the charter of his liberation.

No doubt it will make changes that will be denounced as revolutionary, and then recognised as innocent and even good.

He declined office on the ground that if a man changes his party connection, he is bound to give proof that he wishes the change from no merely personal motive, and that he is not a gainer by it.

That I was conscious of having incurred a great responsibility, and felt the difficulty which arises when great issues are raised, and a man can only act and speak upon the best lights he possesses, aware all the time that he may be in…

I said that her Majesty’s frankness, so well known, was a main ground of the entire reliance of her ministers upon her.

Childers occurred to me as an administrator of eminent capacity and conciliatory in his modes of action; his mind would be open on the grave subjects treated by the Commission, which did not appear to me to be even for Lord Cardwell…

The greatest of all these difficulties, I thought, centred in the India office, and I was very much inclined to think Lord Hartington would be eminently qualified to deal with them, and would thereby take a place in the government suitable…

I said that it seemed to me in the present state of the country the first object was to provide for the difficulties of statesmanship, and then to deal with those of administration.

The report of the Commission would show that Lord Cardwell’s system of short service had entirely broken down, and that a change must be made at any rate as regarded the non-commissioned officers.

I said I had obtained the co-operation of Lord Granville and Lord Hartington, and that my knowledge and belief as to prevailing dispositions would, I think, warrant me in undertaking to form a government, it being her Majesty’s pleasure.

But since they had given this advice, it was not consistent with my duty to shrink from any responsibility which I had incurred, and I was aware that I had incurred a very great responsibility.

Promises of this kind, I said, stood on slippery ground, and must always be understood with the limits which might be prescribed by conviction.

Nothing else can possibly absolve them from their presumptive obligation as standing at the head of the party which for the time represents the country.