I believe that it was better to get rid of a foul abuse in the way in which it was got rid of, than not to get rid of it at all, especially as the House of Commons had already decided against it.

To have a vote is to have power; as Burke said, “liberty is power, when men act in bodies”; but the secret vote is power without responsibility.

The vote is a trust for the commonwealth; to permit secrecy makes it look like a right conferred for a man’s own benefit.

You enjoin upon him to give his vote on public grounds; in the same voice you tell him not to let the public know how he gives it.

Remove publicity and its checks, then all the mean motives of mankind—their malice, petty rivalries, pique, the prejudices that men would be ashamed to put into words even to themselves—skulk to the polling booth under a disguising cloak.

Secrecy, again, prevents the statesman from weighing or testing the forces in character, stability, persistency, of the men by whom a majority has been built up, and on whose fidelity his power of action must depend.

The farmer was afraid of his landlord, and the labourer was afraid of the farmer; the employer could tighten the screw on the workman, the shopkeeper feared the power of his best customers, the debtor quailed before his creditor, the…

Not only was the open vote not free; it exposed its possessor to so much bullying, molestation, and persecution, that his possession came to be less of a boon than a nuisance.

I have at all times given my vote in favour of open voting, but I have done so before, and I do so now, with an important reservation, namely, that whether by open voting or by whatsoever means, free voting must be secured.

The secret vote appeared to be required by the social conditions under which they lived, and therefore it had become a necessity and a duty to give effect to the principle.

Gladstone said the people’s bill had been passed by the people’s House, and when it was next presented at the door of the House of Lords, it would be with an authoritative knock.

In one only of the three kingdoms the ballot helped to make a truly vital difference; it dislodged the political power of the Irish landlord.

In England its influence made for purity, freedom, and decency, but it developed no new sources of liberal strength.

The same favourite prejudices, amiable and otherwise; the same antipathies, coupled with ill-regulated though benevolent efforts to eradicate human evils, are well-nigh universal.

A House of Commons cannot afford to be above its own constituencies in intelligence, knowledge, or patriotism.”(242) In all this the element of truth is profound enough.

In every change of political machinery the reformer promises and expects a new heaven and a new earth; then standing forces of national tradition, character, and institution assert their strength, our millennium lags, and the chilled…

It was denounced as reactionary, as violating the first principles of fiscal administration, and as the very worst tax that had been proposed within recent memory, for is not a match a necessary of life, and to tax a necessary of life is…

He fought with all his strength for a reduction of the public burdens, and in at least one of these persistent battles with colleagues of a less economising mind than himself, he came near to a breach within the walls of his cabinet.

I can speak from experience, for I know what it has been to have had cast upon my shoulders the most important and most offensive duty of the financial minister....

For the present at least the reformation will operate against the reformers.

Nothing is more common than for men to wish, and call loudly too, for a reformation, who when it arrives do by no means like the severity of its aspect.

Reformation is one of those pieces which must be put at some distance in order to please.

I replied that the Roman system had grown up by a multitude of scarcely perceptible degrees out of the earliest form of Christianity, and if we adopted this notion of legitimate development, we ran a risk of making Saint Paul responsible…

She hates war; and is not easy as to the future.

Oct. 4.—Nothing sets me up in mind and body like a mountain solitude, not even, perhaps, the sea.