John Morley

Her Majesty’s government, therefore, could not pretend to blame the King of Sardinia for assisting them.

For the measure is of immense importance and of no less nicety, and here it all depends on me.

Lord John backs me most cordially and well, but it is no small thing to get a cabinet to give up one and a half or two millions of revenue at a time when all the public passion is for enormous expenditure, and in a case beset with great…

To Cobden, Jan. 28.—Criticism is busy; but the only thing really formidable is the unavowed but strong conflict with that passionate expectation of war, which no more bears disappointment than if it were hope or love.

It was in fact a counter-irritant; and it aroused the sense of commercial interest to counteract the war passion.

With characteristic modesty he said, “I am a dwarf on the shoulders of a giant.

Gladstone said that they were without exception free traders, but not free traders without exception.

The magnitude and comprehensiveness of the enterprise seized the imagination of the country.

It is a marked and significant act of entire separation from the whole party and will strengthen Disraeli’s hands.

I said to him, “Lord John, I will go down on my knees to you, to entreat you not to press that request.” But he persevered; and this although he was both a loyal colleague and a sincere friend to the budget and to the French treaty.

But there was the opportunity of mischief; and round the carcass the vultures now gathered in overwhelming force.

It at once became clear that the Lords would avail themselves of the opportunity afforded them by the single presentation of financial bills, and would prolong, and virtually re-enact a tax, which the representatives of the people had…

I think he proposed to use some meaningless words in the House of Commons as to the value we set on our privileges, and our determination to defend them if attacked, by way of garniture to the act of their abandonment.

In this proceeding nothing would induce me to acquiesce, though I earnestly desired that the mildest means of correction should be adopted.

On the whole, I hope that in this grave matter at least we have turned the corner.

Burke’s famous mosaic, but we are a mosaic in solution, that is to say, a kaleidoscope.(27) When the instrument turns, the separate pieces readjust themselves, and all come out in perfectly novel combinations.

All improvements have to be urged in apologetic, almost in supplicatory tones.

The fiscal consideration, he concluded, “is nothing compared with the vital importance of maintaining the exclusive rights of the House of Commons in matter of supply.

Assuming that they will be wise, yet I for one am not willing that the House of Commons should hold on sufferance in the nineteenth century what it won in the seventeenth and confirmed and enlarged in the eighteenth.

The House of Lords, for its misconduct, was deservedly extinguished, in effect, as to all matters of finance.

The abiding feature of constitutional interest in the budget of 1861 was this inclusion of the various financial proposals in a single bill, so that the Lords must either accept the whole of them, or try the impossible performance of…

This was the affirmation in practical shape of the resolution of the House of Commons in the previous year, that it possessed in its own hands the power to remit and impose taxes, and that the right to frame bills of supply in its own…

In a people of bold and martial temper such as are the people of our island, this proved to be a miscalculation.

But in a cause that he had at heart he was untiring, unfaltering, and indomitable.

We have to do with a godless people who look on war as a game open to all without responsibility or sin; and there is a man at the head of them who combines the qualities of a gambler and a fatalist.