John Morley

I said that it seemed to me in the present state of the country the first object was to provide for the difficulties of statesmanship, and then to deal with those of administration.

The greatest of all these difficulties, I thought, centred in the India office, and I was very much inclined to think Lord Hartington would be eminently qualified to deal with them, and would thereby take a place in the government suitable…

Childers occurred to me as an administrator of eminent capacity and conciliatory in his modes of action; his mind would be open on the grave subjects treated by the Commission, which did not appear to me to be even for Lord Cardwell…

I said that her Majesty’s frankness, so well known, was a main ground of the entire reliance of her ministers upon her.

That I was conscious of having incurred a great responsibility, and felt the difficulty which arises when great issues are raised, and a man can only act and speak upon the best lights he possesses, aware all the time that he may be in…

He declined office on the ground that if a man changes his party connection, he is bound to give proof that he wishes the change from no merely personal motive, and that he is not a gainer by it.

No doubt it will make changes that will be denounced as revolutionary, and then recognised as innocent and even good.

The Irish peasant, after suffering centuries of oppression and tyrannic wrong, at last got the charter of his liberation.

If I have interpreted you aright, and I hope you will tell me whether I have done so or not, this is all to me exceedingly curious; such are the differences in the opinions of men formed from their different points of view.

But I then clearly pointed out that, even with the scale of expenditure they then proposed, we could not abolish the income-tax in 1860.

My view was, and I stated it, that we ought to provide for this expenditure in a due proportion between direct and indirect taxes.

But, though reliefs, they were hardly reforms; and experience had shown us that reforms were in fact double and treble reliefs.

We took the more arduous, but I think the more honourable course for a government to pursue.

Had we abandoned the bill, I know not how we could have looked in the face those who had acted and invested on the faith of an unbroken practice.

It was a budget of peace, and peace wanted it.

To have been the occasion of the blow to the House of Commons, or as I call it the “gigantic innovation,” will be a grief to me as long as I live; if by wildness and rashness I have been its cause, it will be a much greater grief.

On the whole when I think of the cabinet, I always go back to Jacob and Esau fighting in their mother’s womb; only here there have been many Jacobs and Esaus, by which I do not mean the sixteen members of the cabinet, but the many and very…

Perhaps I should find it easiest in the work of confession to own my neighbour’s faults, i.e. to dwell upon those strange sins of foreign policy which have happily for the most part been nipped in the bud almost à l’unanimité (yet with…

It is a vile precedent to give away money by remission, and borrow to supply the void; and in the full and chief responsibility for having established this precedent I am involved, not by the budget of February but by the consent of July…

Sir Robert Walpole had not to contend with like difficulties, and I think his administration should be compared with the early years of Pitt’s, in which way of judging he would come off second, though a man of cool and sagacious judgment…

I, for my part, look with the deepest interest upon the share that I had in concluding—I will not say so much in concluding, but in conducting on this side of the water, and within the walls of parliament as well as in administration—the…

It enormously increased the trade between this country and France.

There was no more powerful instrument for confining and controlling those wayward and angry spirits at that particular crisis, than the commercial treaty with France.

It produced no inconsiderable effect for a number of years upon the legislation of various European countries, which tended less decisively than we could have desired, but still intelligibly and beneficially, in the direction of freedom of…

But you have a right to my recollections such as they are, and I will not withhold them.