John Morley Quotes

In the American civil war partisanship with the sides there was the veil of a kind of civil war here. An unspoken instinct revealed to mutually hostile classes in England that their battle also was being fought in the contest between the free North and the slave-holding South. The triumph of the North, as has been often remarked, was the force that made English liberalism powerful enough to enfranchise the workmen, depose official Christianity in Ireland, and deal a first blow at the landlords.

The evils of a military system, which, after all, every day must attenuate, are light compared with the evils of an anarchic conservatism reinstated in central Europe. Divided Germany means preponderating Russia. What can be more desirable in the interests of the highest civilisation than the interposition in the heart of the European state-system, of a powerful, industrious, intelligent, and progressive people, between the western nations and the half-barbarous Russian swarms? To the careful observer of the history of modern Europe it is plain that increasing vigour and self-conscious strength in Germany are other words for the spread eastwards of the best of those ideas, the most durable of those civilising elements, in which the difference of historic development has enabled England and France to anticipate her.

It is not for the candidates, but for the temper shown by the constituencies, that one may grieve, if there be matter for grief in the unmistakable proof which the elections are furnishing, that people do not recognise the necessity of giving supreme political power to supreme political intelligence.

There is the Irish question... Underneath the surface of this, and wrapped up in it, are nearly all the controversies of principle which will agitate the political atmosphere for our time. It is a microcosm of the whole imperial question. It is the test of our fitness to deal with the other problems which modern circumstance, pressing hard against the old order of ideas and traditions, is forcing upon our attention. The functions of the State, the duties of property, the rights of labour, the question whether the many are born for the few, the question of a centralised imperial power, the question of the pre-eminence of morals in politics—all these things lie in Irish affairs.

If we survey the entire field of political action, we shall find that progress, wherever it is stayed, is stayed by the untimely relics of territorialism, and that in removing them we at once find ourselves led on to the true conditions by taking the policy of industry for our foundation. The industrial policy is emphatically the national policy... At nearly every point it is the superstition or sinister interest of the territorial power which thwarts, restrains, and depresses the harmonious adjustment of laws and administration to the needs of the public well-being.

The new problem for statesmen will be not how the Queen's Government may be carried on, but how the National Will may be most promptly executed.

The extreme advanced party is likely for the future to have on its side a great portion of the most highly cultivated intellect in the nation, and the contest will lie between brains and numbers on the one side, and wealth, rank, vested interest, possession in short, on the other.