John Morley

It is this that gives William Pitt so unique a position among our statesmen.

His figure in fact stands at the opening of a new epoch in English history--in the history not of England only, but of the English race.

However dimly and imperfectly, he alone among his fellows saw that the struggle of the Seven Years' War was a struggle of a wholly different order from the struggles that had gone before it.

He felt that the stake he was playing for was something vaster than Britain's standing among the powers of Europe.

Let us agree, for argument's sake, that the expansion of England is the most important of the threads that it is the historian's business to disengage from the rest of the great strand of our history in the eighteenth century.

Surely the preservation of parliamentary freedom was as important as the curtailment of British dominion, and only less important than the rise of the new American state.

If the expansion of England was important, not less important were other changes vitally affecting the internal fortunes of the land that was destined to undergo this process.

Expansion only acquired its significance in consequence of what happened in England itself.

It is the growth of population at home, as a result of our vast extension of manufactures, that makes our colonies both possible and important.

There would be nothing capricious or perverse in treating the expansion of England over the seas as strictly secondary to the expansion of England within her own shores, and to all the causes of it in the material resources and the energy…

Enormous territory is only one of the acquisitions or instruments of England, and we know no reason why that particular element of growth should be singled out as overtopping the other elements that made it so important as it is.

It is not the mere multiplication of a race, nor its diffusion over the habitable globe that sets its deepest mark on the history of a state, but rather those changes in idea, disposition, faculty, and, above all, in institution, which…

Neither Australia nor Canada approached the United States in vigour, originality, and spirit, until, like the United States, they were left free to work out their own problems in their own way.

Independence not only put Americans on their mettle, but it left them with fresh views, with a temper of unbounded adaptability, with an infinite readiness to try experiments, and free room to indulge it as largely as ever they pleased.

It is not sentiment but material advantages that settle the currents of emigration.

When soil, climate, facility of acquisition, proximity to English ports, are all equalised, it will be quite time enough to hope for a change in the currents of emigration, and when that time comes the change will be wrought not by…

No true patriot can honestly wish that it should be otherwise, for patriotism is regard for the wellbeing of the people of a country as well as affection for its flag.

Many other writers have tried to put this idea into real shape, and when we come to ask from them for further and better particulars the difficulties that come into view are insuperable.

The functions of governor should be limited as much as possible to those which are discharged by the Sovereign in the present working of the Constitution, and to State ceremonies.

If that is all, we can only say that seldom has so puny a mouse come forth from so imposing a mountain.

Of all ways of gratifying a democratic community that we have ever heard of, the institution of hereditary rank seems the most singular,--supported, as we presume that rank would be, by primogeniture and landed settlements.

But this loyalty is nourished at a great distance, and by tens of thousands daily increasing, who have never known any land but the one dear land where they dwell.

Each large colony will have relations to foreign countries more and more distant from those of the mother country, and must be allowed to deal with those relations itself.

Any such system would be attended with all the evils of defective foresight, and would both fetter and irritate.

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