John Richard Green Quotes

As in the modern instance of Hungary, the part which the Parliament was to play in the period which followed Cromwell's fall shows the importance of clinging to the forms of constitutional freedom, even when their life seems lost. In the inevitable reaction against tyranny they afford centres for the reviving energies of the people. It is of hardly less importance that the tide of liberty, when it again returns, is enabled through their preservation to flow quietly and naturally along its traditional channels.

I won't divide by Kings, a system whereby History is made Tory unawares and infants are made to hate History.

So we are to have a dissolution! I think it would be a good thing for Liberalism if we got a good beating this time and had time to form a policy in opposition. The next question which the party must stand upon must be the Dis-establishment of the Church. The Ritualists have convinced me of its necessity. I can't abide paying money to make England Papist. But don't think me a Bismarck-man, as I am sorry to find Bryce is. I am still an "old Radical," and a worshipper of "Joe Hume."

The whole moral effect which is produced now-a-days by the religious newspaper, the tract, the essay, the lecture, the missionary report, the sermon, was then produced by the Bible alone. And its effect in this way, however dispassionately we examine it, was simply amazing. The whole temper of the nation was changed. A new conception of life and of man superseded the old. A new moral and religious impulse spread through every class. Literature reflected the general tendency of the time; and the dumpy little quartos of controversy and piety, which still crowd our older libraries, drove before them the classical translations and Italian novelettes of the age of Elizabeth. "Theology rules there," said Grotius of England, only ten years after the Queen's death; and when Casaubon, the last of the great scholars of the sixteenth century, was invited to England by King James, he found both King and people indifferent to letters. "There is a great abundance of theologians in England," he says to a friend; "all point their studies in that direction."

What one really sees on the Continent, if one likes to learn from their statesmen and journals instead of from the chatter of table d'hôtes, is the immense influence for good which England is just now wielding. I see Mr. Fish tells Spain to compare England's colonial policy with her own if she wants to know how to manage a colony. So in Germany "English Constitutionalism" is getting too hard even for Bismarck, as his remarkable speech about ministerial responsibility showed. It was the argument from England alone which he cared to answer. So here the influence of France seems to have faded away,—it is English order, English justice, English self-government that Italians are talking about as a model for their own.

Whether Gladstone takes office or no let us never forget that the triumph is his. He and he only among the Liberals I met or heard of never despaired. He and he only foresaw what the verdict on this "great trial" would be. When folk talk of "cool-headed statesmen" and "sentimental rhetoricians" again I shall always call to mind that in taking stock of English opinion at this crisis the "sentimental rhetorician" was right and the cool-headed statesmen were wrong. It is just as with political sentiment itself. The Tories hate it, and the Whigs scorn it; and yet the great force which has transformed Europe, which has been the secret of its history ever since 1815, is a political "sentiment"—that of Nationality.

As you see in my own Wee-Book, I think moral and intellectual facts as much facts for the historian as military or political facts.

I shall never be content till I have superseded Hume, and I believe I shall supersede him—not because I am so good a writer, but because, being an adequate writer, I have a larger and grander conception than he had of the organic life of a nation as a whole.

Mr. Howard talked politics and told me the passage at the close of Carlyle's letter meant a plan of Lord Beaconsfield for at once occupying Constantinople! I am afraid we are drifting into war—into war on the side of the Devil and in the cause of Hell. It will be so terrible to have to wish England beaten. People are all shy now of saying in the old-fashioned way that they love their country. Well I am not ashamed to say it. I love England dearly. But I love her too well to wish her triumphant if she fight against human right and human freedom. Pitt longed for her defeat in America, but it killed him when it came. I can understand that double feeling now.

Of course in calling Cromwell a "tyrant" I used the word in its strict sense; and in that sense I don't think he is fairly a "tyrant" till he dissolves the 1654 Parliament. My notion of his character is, I am afraid, a new one... Cromwell seems to me neither the ambitious hypocrite nor the "governing genius" which people on one side or the other try to make him out, but a very right-meaning and able man who got with quite honest intentions into a false position and had not political genius enough to clear out of it. Of administrative genius he had plenty of course. All his later story seems to me very pathetic and mournful in the revolt he shows at his position of tyrant, and yet his inability to free himself from it.

The fact is I am a little puzzled with "Liberals" who go in for enslaving Lorraine and turning Elsass, as Bismarck puts it, into a "German Venetia." It is not a question of loving France or loving Germany. It is a question of falling back on the platform of the Treaty of Vienna and dealing with peoples as if they were cyphers. Your indifference to the will of the people themselves is of the old Tory and Metternich order. I never yet met a French provincial to whom France was not more than his own province. In Normandy, for instance, you never could get a Norman to see things in your way. Alsatians I meet now every day at Sydenham; they speak German, but they are French to the core. There can be no question about the Lorrainers. The truth is you care a good deal for freedom in the past,—but in the present you hate France more than you love liberty.

I am very wretched, really wretched, about Gladstone's retirement. I can't follow him everywhither, but he is my leader, and I don't see any other to lead me on the Liberal benches. And I am cast down by the general ingratitude. Everybody I meet (save the Holy Roman) seems glad he is gone. It makes me want to carry out my notion of writing a history from 1815 to now, if only to say that I for one love and honour Gladstone as I love and honour no other living statesman.

So prodigious has been the store of original documents, charters, rolls, dispatches, memoirs which have of late been disinterred from the archives of the past, that history has retrograded into annals.

I begin to see that there may be a truer wisdom in the "humanitarianism" of Gladstone than in the purely political views of Disraeli. The sympathies of peoples with peoples, the sense of a common humanity between nations, the aspirations of nationalities after freedom and independence, are real political forces; and it is just because Gladstone owns them as forces, and Disraeli disowns them that the one has been on the right side, and the other on the wrong in parallel questions such as the upbuilding of Germany or Italy. I think it will be so in this upbuilding of the Sclave.

[I]n spite of all the Gairdners and "Rollsmen" I shall go on loving freedom and the men who won it for us to the end of the chapter. In an offshoot of the Times yesterday I saw some remarks of Bismarck on "despatches" and "State papers," which the Ranke school might weigh to their great profit. He looks on such materials as of very little value. "What," he asks, "would all the current despatches tell of my real policy or that of Gladstone or Thiers"? Surely they tell even less of national feeling, of those impulses which (and not the policy of statesmen) really—with my Lord Beaconsfield's and Ranke's good leave—make history.