John Richard Green Quotes

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 really notable thing about the elections is the political "cleavage" they denote. It will be an ill day when, as in France, our political lines of division coincide with our social and religious lines. Yet that is what this election points to. Liberalism is becoming more and more coincident with Nonconformity; it is becoming less and less common among men of the higher social class. The bulk of the nobles and the gentry, almost all the parsons, the bulk of the lawyers, I fear an increasing number of doctors, are all Conservative. I see that Liberals have an intellectual work to do as well as a directly political. I mean that they must convert the upper classes as well as organise the lower. And this perhaps may force on us soon a higher and a more intelligent Liberalism than we have now.

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.

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.