John Richard Green Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.