Edward Augustus Freeman Quotes

We must recognize the spirit which dictated the Petition of Right as the same which gathered all England around the banners of returning Godwin, and remember that the "good old cause" was truly that for which Harold died on the field and Waltheof on the scaffold.

I cannot but think that the indulgence in cruelty in any form and in any degree must more or less harden the heart. I am far from saying that every fox-hunter is a bad man, but I certainly think that, cæteris paribus, the fox-hunter would be a better man if he were not a fox-hunter. And few would approve of devotion to pursuits of this kind when it becomes the distinguishing feature in the character. A mere fox-hunter, a mere bull-baiter, a mere amateur of gladiators, can never have been an estimable character in any age.

I am parochially minded; but my parish is a big one, taking in all civilized Europe and America.

As far at least as our race is concerned, freedom is everywhere older than bondage; we may add that toleration is older than intolerance. Our ancient history is the possession of the Liberal, who, as being ever ready to reform, is the true Conservative, not of the self-styled Conservative who, by refusing to reform, does all he can to bring on destruction.

I have actually sat down to make a distinct History of the Norman Conquest, which I can do easier than anybody else, as I have worked so much at the subject for twenty years past, that is, a great part of the story; there will be little more to do than to write down what is already in my head.

I know that to run down Lord Macaulay is the fashion of the day. I have heard some speak against him who have a right to speak; I have heard many more who have none. I at least feel that I have none; I do not see how any man can have the right who has not gone through the same work through which Macaulay went, or at least through some no less thorough work of a kindred sort. I can see Macaulay's great and obvious faults as well as any man; I know as well as any man the cautions with which his brilliant pictures must be studied; but I cannot feel that I have any right to speak lightly of one to whom I owe so much in the matter of actual knowledge, and to whom I owe more than to any man as the master of historical narrative. Read a page of Macaulay; scan well his minute accuracy in every name and phrase and title; contrast his English undefiled with the slipshod jargon which from our newspapers has run over into our books; dwell on the style which finds a fitting phrase in our own tongue to set forth every thought, the style which never uses a single word out of its true and honest meaning; turn the pages of the book in which no man ever read a sentence a second time because he failed to catch its meaning the first time, but in which all of us must have read many sentences a second or a twentieth time for the sheer pleasure of dwelling on the clearness, the combined fulness and terseness, on the just relation of every word to every other, on the happily chosen epithet, or the sharply pointed sarcasm .

That Mahometanism is essentially an obstructive, intolerant system, supplying just sufficient good to stand in the way of greater good. It has consecrated despotism; it has consecrated polygamy; it has consecrated slavery. It has declared war against every other creed; it has claimed to be at least dominant in every land. And in one sense it has rightly so claimed. So long as a Mahometan nation is dominant and conquering, so long is it great and glorious after its own standard. When it ceases to have an enemy to contend against, it sinks into sluggish stupidity and into a barbarism far viler than that of the conquerors who raised it to greatness. It must have an enemy; if cut off, like Persia, from conflict with the infidel, it finds its substitute in sectarian hatred of brother Moslems. Islam has founded mighty empires, it has reared splendid palaces, it has accumulated libraries of countless volumes. But it has done nothing for man in his highest earthly capacity, as the citizen of a free state; it has done nothing for the higher even of his purely speculative faculties. By slightly reforming, it has perpetuated and sanctified all the evils of the eastern world. It has, by its aggressive tenets, brought them into more direct antagonism with the creed and civilization of the west. A system, originally the greatest of reforms in its own age and country, has proved the curse and scourge of the world for twelve hundred years.

I must confess that I have never read W. Malmsb. de Pont. His Kings are enough to make me thoroughly despise him as a lying affected French scoundrel.

At Trieste I saw Burton. ... I remember him, thirty-five years ago, the wildest-looking creature; now he is shorn and looks quite respectable. He has killed more men than most people; but they were mainly Turks.

I have no doubt that, if I had stood on the hill of Senlac, I should have felt a strong satisfaction in cleaving the skull of a Norman. But feelings of this kind need to be kept under careful control. As soon as either war or hunting loses its purely defensive character, as soon as it is pursued, not distinctly for the public good, but as a matter of sport or out of sheer love of slaughter, as soon as suffering is needlessly inflicted or wantonly prolonged, it ceases to be a righteous and praiseworthy occupation, and comes under the general head of cruelty.

Can any modern fox-hunter honestly say that his hunting is done with the legitimate object of getting rid of a noxious animal in the quickest way? It is nothing of the kind. It is plain that instead of men hunting with any object of getting rid of foxes, the fox exists simply for the purpose of being hunted. But for the practice of hunting, the fox would long ago have been as extinct in England as his cousin the wolf.

This would be a grand land if only every Irishman would kill a negro, and be hanged for it.

Remember on the other hand that, though neither Reformers in the sixteenth century or Puritans in the seventeenth century strove in any sense for "religious liberty," or for anything but to set up one intolerant system instead of another, yet every blow of the kind was a gain for religious liberty in the long run.

It is not too much to say that Mommsen has no notion whatever of right and wrong. It is not so much that he applauds wrong actions, as that he does not seem to know that right and wrong have anything to do with the matter. No one has set forth more clearly than Mommsen the various stages of the process by which Rome gradually reduced the states round the Mediterranean to a state of dependence—what he, by one of the quasi-technicalities of which we complain, calls a state of clientship. It is, for clear insight into the matter, one of the best parts of the book. But almost every page is disfigured by the writer's unblushing idolatry of mere force. He cannot understand that a small state can have any rights against a great one, or that a patriot in such a state can be anything but a fool.

But here comes the nuisance of the seventeenth century. One can't go unreservedly with any side, as one can with our friends in the thirteenth. My political and my religious sympathies are divided. I go with the Parliament as Parliament; but I can get up no sympathy with the Puritan as Puritan. I don't like his particular form of religion, and he is no more tolerant than anybody else. Surely Gardiner shows that in matters of opinion Laud was immeasureably more liberal than his enemies, and to the little that he really enforced in matters of ceremony there is the best witness, namely, that it has long been universally accepted without anybody of any party objecting, and that, though the letter of the law still allows something else.