Gilbert Murray Quotes

There ought to be some sanction behind international law, and the League of Nations is there to supply it... The problem is not how to concentrate somewhere sufficient force to quell a peace-breaker—that already exists; it is to produce a general state of mind in which the possessors of force will really use it for maintaining the general peace and not merely for supporting their own interests.

[T]he Victorian Age... cared more for life than for thought; consequently it produced abundant and fine life, while its thought was comparatively unambitious and aimed mainly at serving the practical purposes of life. It cared intensely for morals and little for metaphysics; a good deal for religion and scarcely at all for theology... It had an immense faith, a faith in goodness, in duty, in the future of mankind.

Whether or no man might be made perfect, he certainly might be made better and happier than he is; and the conscious pursuit of that object became an accepted source of inspiration to politics and literature. With it went the conception that the necessary condition of the pursuit was freedom: set man free, let him have room to move and external conditions which do not starve or cramp him, and human nature of itself will strive to rise higher. This spirit shows itself in almost all the best English fiction of the period, from romantics like the Brontës, and realists, like George Eliot, to satirists, like Dickens and Thackeray. It had been utterly lacking in Fielding and Smollett, and even in Jane Austen. It shows itself in the immense increase of charitable institutions, of religious missions, of societies for the education of the people. There is no question of hypocrisy. To suppose there is, is the mere petulance of jealously. Shelley's or Gladstone's love of moral improvement was just as genuine as Falstaff's love of sack. But an age of moral earnestness seems in our own day to have been succeeded by an age of relaxation; and one can see in, for instance, such a book as Mr. Strachey's Eminent Victorians that the moral earnestness of Gladstone or Dr. Arnold is felt by the author to be a hateful quality and not easily to be forgiven.

There was a re-birth of public spirit. Gentlemen ceased to take bribes. Justice became incorruptible... It has been observed that up to about 1820 the laws passed by Parliament had almost all been for the protection of the privileged few against the many; after that time they are predominantly for the protection of the nation as a whole against abuse and privilege. Instead of the ferocious defence of property, a spirit of sympathy and help to the oppressed begins to inspire legislation. The old revolutionary doctrine of the infinite perfectibility of mankind, which had set on fire the enthusiasm of Godwin, Shelley and Condorcet, passed in a milder and more reasonable form into the general imagination of the age.

Now the Victorian Age, or the nineteenth century as a whole, was a great moral reformer... It proclaimed that men, even courtiers and noblemen, ought not to be drunken or dissolute or even corrupt, that politics were really concerned with the welfare of the people, that the rich had duties towards the poor. The transition from George IV and his unpleasing brothers to the young Queen and the Prince Consort was typical of a much wider change. When Lord Palmerston was caught chasing a maid of honour into her bedroom, the excuse made for him was: "Your Majesty should remember that he is a very old gentleman and accustomed to the manners of the late Court".

The advance in humanity and care for the alleviation of suffering is also, so far as I know, without a parallel: in England alone in this period we find the abolition of slavery—at the cost of £20,000,000 of public money willingly given: the sweeping reform of the old criminal law and the barbarous penal system which accompanied it... We find the reform in the treatment of lunatics; the laws against cruelty to children and to animals; the Factory Acts; the Married Women's Property Acts; the immense spread of education in all it stages, both by public authority and by private experiment; the beginnings of the care for public health; the...greatly decreased consumption of alcohol... [I]t was, of course, the great age of Liberalism.

As we get further away from the England of the nineteenth century, and see it separated from us by the great gulf of the war, we shall perhaps be better able to see it as it really was, to appreciate its extraordinary greatness, its peculiar faults and flaws, and to a remarkable degree its unity. Beyond question it was a very great age indeed. For Great Britain especially it marked the zenith of national success, the widest expansion over the world of British government, British commerce, British political thought, British morals, philosophy, science, poetry and prose literature. It was a time when Indian rajahs and Chinese mandarins learnt to play cricket and read Macaulay, as now they are learning baseball and frequenting the movies.

Is it pedantic, is it the mere result of my special education, that I fall back again upon Aristotle? He tells us that Happiness in the highest sense, or the true end of human life, is first activity, next unimpeded activity, and lastly unimpeded activity "according to virtue"; that is to say, on right lines and for good ends. Surely we want, both as individuals and as a community, to pursue that quest for the attainment or the creation of "a good life for man"; we want to get to that work unhindered and uncrippled, and therefore, apart from other reasons, we need above all things peace.

This service of civilization is our true work; the occupation that gives meaning to life. We need peace, inward and outward, because peace leaves us free to attend to it; while war—or, indeed, any violent hatred—interrupts and wrecks and perverts.

[T]he main work of life lies in carrying on worthily the great common task of civilization: to play one's due part in the enterprise of feeding some hundreds of millions of men, in seeing that they are protected against violence and fraud, that they have access to justice, and as far as may be to education, that they have some freedom to pursue life and happiness, and are not cut off altogether from the wonders and beauties of the world and the mind of man. To succeed in doing this is civilization: to fail is the defeat of civilization. For civilization is, ultimately, the process whereby a human society in search, as Aristotle puts it, of a "good life for man", gradually overcomes the obstacles, material and other, that stand in its way and makes man increasingly master of his environment.

Have you read Keynes on the Economic Consequences of the Peace Conference? I think it is important as giving in a clear and definite form the criticism of a Liberal-minded man who saw the proceedings from the inside... I can not help thinking that it really gives the scheme of a bold Liberal policy in foreign affairs. Aim, the re-integration of Europe, both political and economic. Method, the correction of the Versailles settlement by the L. of N. [I]t gives us a real fighting policy which has the further advantage of being right.

It seems to me important that liberal feeling in England should keep fully in touch with the war...for the sake of the peace settlement afterwards. ... If we win, as seems on the whole probable, we must do our very best for a generous treatment of Germany. ... I think we ought also to go for a strengthening of the Concert and reducing armaments by treaty. Anyhow, whether it is practicable or not, it is enormously important not to have a mere grabbing or jingo settlement.

An old eagle, a blind eagle, who waits hungry and cold and still;
He seeks nothing, he fears nothing: he stands lone on a lonely hill.