John Morley

I have not the smallest doubt we should at this moment have had a smaller expenditure if financial reformers had not directed their chief attention, not to the question how much of expenditure and taxes we shall have, but to the question…

The chancellor of the exchequer,” he said, “should boldly uphold economy in detail; and it is the mark of a chicken-hearted chancellor when he shrinks from upholding economy in detail, when because it is a question of only two or three…

I rejoice to see that neither the heat, the stench, nor service in the courts can exhaust even your superfluous vigour; and it is most ennobling to see such energies devoted to the highest of all purposes—that of replenishing her Majesty’s…

I never in my life was more astonished than upon being told the sum this had cost; I think it was in hundreds of pounds, where I should have expected tens.” Sometimes, no doubt, this thrift descended to the ludicrous.

Though an individual case may often enough seem ludicrous, yet the system and the spirit engendered by it were to the taxpayer, that is to the nation, priceless.

What is their exemption but the equivalent of a gift to them from the general taxpayer?

He has to make good the sum that ought in reason and equity to have been paid by them, as by other people, to the government that protects them.

It turns a rude searchlight upon illusions about charity that are all the more painful to dispel, because they often spring from pity and from sympathy, not the commonest of human elements.

He was far too comprehensive in his outlook to suppose that the great outburst of material prosperity during the years in which he controlled the exchequer and guided parliament in affairs of money, was wholly and without qualification due…

To insist on ascribing complex results to single causes is the well-known vice of narrow and untrained minds.

He was quite alive to the effects of “the enormous, constant, rapid, and diversified development of mechanical power, and the consequent saving of labour by the extension of machinery.” He was well aware of the share of new means of…

The error that lay at the root of our English misconception of the American struggle is now clear.

We applied ordinary political maxims to what was not merely a political contest, but a social revolution.

Without scrutiny of the cardinal realities beneath, we discussed it like some superficial conflict in our old world about boundaries, successions, territorial partitions, dynastic preponderance.

The significance of the American war was its relation to slavery.

Secession was undertaken for the purpose of erecting into an independent state a community whose whole structure was moulded on a system that held labour in contempt, that kept the labourer in ignorance and cruel bondage, that demanded a…

And this barbaric state was to set itself up on the border of a great nation, founded on free industry, political equality, diffused knowledge, energetic progress.

And if so, I think they were wise; for such a question could only arise for any practical purpose at a time when the foundations of the great social deep are broken up, and when the forces brought into unrestrained play are by far too…

I thought and urged that we should hear what the Americans had to say before withdrawing Lyons, for I could not feel sure that we were at the bottom of the law of the case, or could judge here and now what form it would assume.

I ought to be thankful, still more ought I to be ashamed.

Unhappily, the slave must still go in the triumphal car to remind us of the fallibilities of men, and here the conqueror made a grave mistake.

The Southern states, he said, had not de facto established their independence and were not entitled to recognition on any accepted principles of public law.

Strange to say, this declaration, most unwarrantable to be made by a minister of the crown with no authority other than his own, was not due to any feeling of partizanship for the South or hostility to the North.

Many who wished well to the Northern cause despaired of its success.

The friends of the North in England were beginning to advise that it should give way, for the avoidance of further bloodshed and greater calamity.