John Morley

The government speakers have no new defence, and they want the past to be forgotten.

If, as I hope for and believe, no selfish ambition will come in to make mischief, the question will be determined in such a manner as to content all honest men, and what is best for all will be done.

The more I think about the matter, the more strange and mysterious does it seem to me that any party in this free nation should be found to sanction and uphold policy and proceedings like those of the last two years in particular.

The third, weightier than these, was that a liberal government under me would be the object from the first of an amount and kind of hostility, such as materially to prejudice its acts and weaken or, in given circumstances, neutralise its…

If I really believe this, then I should regard my having been morally forced into this work as a great and high election of God.

The word spoken was a word for millions, and for millions who for themselves cannot speak.

I profess to believe it has been an occasion when the battle to be fought was a battle of justice, humanity, freedom, law, all in their first elements from the very root, and all on a gigantic scale.

I humbly ask for confidence when I state my own belief that the objects we have in view at the present time are objects connected with the welfare of mankind upon the widest scale....

I am sustained and encouraged, and I may almost say driven on in public life, by the sentiment believed and entertained by me most sincerely, whether erroneously or not, that the principles at issue are much broader than those of ordinary…

He insisted that we should ever “remember the rights of the savage, as we call him.” “Remember,” he exclaimed, “that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty…

For have not modern times established a sisterhood of nations, equal, independent, each of them built up under the legitimate defence which public law affords to every nation living within its own borders, and seeking to perform its own…

The revival of the analogy of imperial Rome for the guidance of British policy he held up as fundamentally unsound and practically ruinous.

He denounced “the policy of denying to others the rights that we claim ourselves” as untrue, arrogant, and dangerous.

One should take care lest in quenching the spirit of Midlothian, we leave sovereign mastery of the world to Machiavelli.

It was a gleaming array of the political facts of a political indictment, not an aerial fabric of moral abstractions.

For one thing, the speeches were rallying battle-cries, not sermons, and everybody knew the great invisible antagonist with whom the orator before them was with all his might contending.

As the human form is the groundwork of the highest training in art, so those mental pursuits are the highest which have man, considered at large, for their object.

The present assault, far from being destined to final triumph, is a sign of a mental movement, unsteady, though of extreme rapidity, but destined, perhaps, to elevate and strengthen the religion that it sought to overthrow.

If argument failed to the great Christian tradition, he would set small value on the multitude of uninstructed numerical adhesions, or upon the integrity of institutions and the unbroken continuity of rite.

This discourse lasted an hour and a half, and themes, familiar but never outworn nor extinct, were handled with vigour, energy, and onward flow that made them sound as good as novel, and even where they did not instruct or did not edify…

The great political speech, which for that matter is a sort of drama, is not made by passages for elegant extract or anthologies, but by personality, movement, climax, spectacle, and the action of the time.

The statesman who makes or dominates a crisis, who has to rouse and mould the mind of senate or nation, has something else to think about than the production of literary masterpieces.

We are challenged to show passages destined to immortality.

Gladstone’s speeches in his first Midlothian campaign were disparaged, as I have just said, as sentiment rather than politics, as sophistry not sound reason, as illusory enchantment not solid and subsisting truth.

A sure though evil instinct has guided them in choosing rather to demoralise our finance, than to pay their way by imposing taxes, but I do not see how they are long to escape this difficulty....