John Morley

Had the cabinet adopted at this moment a good and sufficient scheme for dealing with the Irish tenants as tenants, I should care little how much you depreciated such a scheme in comparison with one for converting them into owners.

This is not a time at which those who in substance agree, can afford to throw away strength by the relative depreciation of those parts of a plan of relief, to which they do not themselves give the first place in importance.

It is most dangerous to discredit propositions which you mean to adopt, in the face of any who (as yet) do not mean to adopt them, and who may consistently and honourably use all your statements against them, nay, who would really be bound…

If your seven propositions were law to-day, you would have made but a very small progress towards settling the land question of Ireland.

What might surprise us, if anything in Irish doings could surprise us, is that though this was a measure for Irish tenants, it was deemed heinously wrong to ascertain directly from their representatives what the Irish tenants thought.

To this great country the state of Ireland after seven hundred years of our tutelage is in my opinion so long as it continues, an intolerable disgrace, and a danger so absolutely transcending all others, that I call it the only real danger…

The new voters showed that they were not afraid of new ideas.

Wanton eviction will, as I hope, be extinguished by provisions like these.

And if they extinguish wanton eviction, they will also extinguish those demands for unjust augmentations of rent, which are only formidable to the occupier, because the power of wanton or arbitrary eviction is behind them.” What seems so…

It transferred to the tenant a portion of the absolute ownership, and gave him something like an estate in his holding.

Gladstone himself always leaned strongly against these exceptional laws, and pressed the Irish government hard the other way.

I am afraid that local opinion has exercised, habitually and traditionally, too much influence in Ireland, and has greatly compromised the character of the empire.

I am not friendly to the idea of constraining by law either the total or the partial suppression of conscientious differences in religion, with a view to fusion of different sects whether in church or school.

I believe that the free development of conviction is upon the whole the system most in favour both of truth and of charity.

After the extension of the franchise to the workmen, everybody felt, in a happy phrase of that time, that “we must educate our masters.” Outside events were supposed to hold a lesson.

It is surprising how little serious attention had been paid even by speculative writers in this country to the vast problem of the relative duties of the State and the Family in respect of education.

Yet the questions of national education, answer them as we will, touch the moral life and death of nations.

The question was whether the system about to be created should merely supplement those sectarian, private, voluntary schools, or should erect a fabric worthy of the high name of national.

Instead of the school boards being universal, they should only come into existence where the ecclesiastical party was not strong enough in wealth, influence, and liberality to keep them out.

Instead of compulsory attendance being universal, that principle could only be applied where a school board was found, and where the school board liked to apply it.

I hope my hon. friend will not continue his support to the government one moment longer than he deems it consistent with his sense of right and duty.

It is impossible to imagine a question on which in a free government it was more essential to carry public opinion with the law.

To force parents to send children to school, was an enterprise that must break down if opinion would not help to work it.

It was not religious but ecclesiastical, and that is often the very contrary of religious.

From the point of party strategy, the policy of this great statute was fatal.