John Morley

That is hardly the right name for the merciless hunt of an abject fellow-creature through the doublings and windings of a thousand lies.

So in the ghastliest wreck of life, men still hope and seek for some mysterious cleansing of the soul that shall repair all.

Forster had denounced the action of the Lords with indignation, and was not he, the responsible minister, a better witness than the three judges in no contact with contemporary fact?

How were the judges authorised to affirm that the Land bill of 1881 had not been a great cause in mitigating the condition of Ireland?

Another conclusive objection was that—on the declaration of the judges themselves, rightly made by them—what we know to be essential portions of the evidence were entirely excluded from their view.

Gladstone was compelled to say that in his opinion to deny the moral authority of the Act of Union was for an Irishman no moral offence whatever.

I heard you examine your witness from a pedestal, as you felt, of the greatest elevation, endeavouring to press home the monstrous guilt of an Irishman who did not allow moral authority to the Act of Union.

Was parliament now to affirm and record a finding that it had scrupulously abstained from ever making its own, and without regard to the counter-allegation that more crime and worse crime was prevented by agitation?

It was the duty of parliament to look at the whole of the facts of the great crisis of 1880-1—to the distress, to the rejection of the Compensation bill, to the growth of evictions, to the prevalence of excessive rents.

The judges expressly shut out this comprehensive survey.

But the House was not a body with a limited commission; it was a body of statesmen, legislators, politicians, bound to look at the whole range of circumstances, and guilty of misprision of justice if they failed so to do.

I hear no challenges upon that statement, for I think it is generally and deeply felt that without the agitation the Land Act would not have been passed.

Everything that was found not to be proved against the Irishmen, was assumed against them.

Not proven was treated as only an evasive form of guilty.

Though the three judges found that there was no evidence that the accused had done this thing or that, yet it was held legitimate to argue that evidence must exist—if only it could be found.

The public were to nurse a sort of twilight conviction and keep their minds in a limbo of beliefs that were substantial and alive—only the light was bad.

The nobler a soul is, the more objects of compassion it hath.

I think the impolicy amounts almost to madness especially for a country which carries with her, nestling in her bosom, the “standing menace” of the popedom....

It is in my opinion an awful error and constitutes the great danger of the country.

I am not so much afraid of the Pope as of the Italian government and court.

My sentiments are so very strong about the present foreign policy.

Faith in lectures, sermons, articles, even books, is one of the things most easily overdone.

Every year brings me, as I reckon, from three to five thousand new correspondents, of whom I could gladly dispense with 99 per cent.

Until I am released from politics by the solution of the Irish problem, I cannot even survey the field.

I have just finished his volume on Infallibility, which fills me with admiration of its easy movement, command of knowledge, singular faculty of disentanglement, and great skill and point in argument; though he does not quite make one love…