John Morley

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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…

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…

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…

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 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.

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

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 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…

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.

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

But these communications are useful, as they give distinctness to ideas, and through ideas to intentions.

In an easy case any man can plead, and against shattered walls the puniest strength prevails; ’tis the overthrow of standing towers and frowning ramparts that tests manhood.

The first duty of an English minister should be to consolidate that co-operation which renders irresistible the community educated, as our own, in an equal love of liberty and law.

Having attempted and failed to enfeeble our colonies by their policy of decomposition, they may perhaps now recognise in the disintegration of the United Kingdom, a mode which will not only accomplish, but precipitate their purpose....