This illusion has been and still is of incalculable benefit to the human race.

Equality is not artificially established in a new colony; it establishes itself.

The mass of the English people are politically contented as well as politically deferential.

Respect is traditional; it is given not to what is proved to be good, but to what is known to be old.

A deferential community in which the bulk of the people are ignorant, is therefore in a state of what is called in mechanics unstable equilibrium.

It is known, too, to every one conversant with the real course of the recent history of England, that Prince Albert really did gain great power in precisely the same way.

The statesmen who had most power in England were men of far greater experience than himself.

He might, and no doubt did, exercise a great, if not a commanding influence over Lord Malmesbury, but he could not rule Lord Palmerston.

The old statesman who governed England, at an age when most men are unfit to govern their own families, remembered a whole generation of states men who were dead before Prince Albert was born.

The facts will be known to our children's children, though not to us.

It would be childish to suppose that a conference between a Minister and his sovereign can ever be a conference of pure argument.

The divinity which doth hedge a king" may have less sanctity than it had, but it still has much sanctity.

The best instance is Lord Chatham, the most dictatorial and imperious of English statesmen, and almost the first English statesman who was borne into power against the wishes of the king and against the wishes of the nobility--the first…

On the contrary, he was the slave of his own imagination; there was a kind of mystic enchantment in vicinity to the monarch which divested him of his ordinary nature.

He will not refute the bad arguments of the king as he will refute another man's bad arguments.

He will not state his own best arguments effectively and incisively when he knows that the king would not like to hear them.

In a nearly balanced argument the king must always have the better, and in politics many most important arguments are nearly balanced.

Whenever there was much to be said for the king's opinion it would have its full weight; whatever was said for the Minister's opinion would only have a lessened and enfeebled weight.

We know, at least, that facts are many; that progress is complicated; that burning ideas (such as young men have) are mostly false and always incomplete.

The notion of a far-seeing and despotic statesman, who can lay down plans for ages yet unborn, is a fancy generated by the pride of the human intellect to which facts give no support.

The plans of Charlemagne died with him; those of Richelieu were mistaken; those of Napoleon gigantesque and frantic.

But a wise and great constitutional monarch attempts no such vanities.

His career is not in the air; he labours in the world of sober fact; he deals with schemes which can be effected--schemes which are desirable--schemes which are worth the cost.

A sagacious and original constitutional monarch might go to his grave in peace if any man could.

The progress of the military art is the most conspicuous, I was about to say the most SHOWY, fact in human history.