William Ewart Gladstone Quotes

To maintain a steady surplus of income over expenditure—to lower indirect taxes when excessive in amount for the relief of the people and bearing in mind the reproductive power inherent in such operations—to simplify our fiscal system by concentrating its pressure on a few well chosen articles of extended consumption—and to conciliate support to the income tax by marking its temporary character and by associating it with beneficial changes in the laws: these aims have been for fifteen years the labour of our life.

That reform of the land laws, that abolition of the present system of entail, together with just facilities for the transfer of land, is absolutely necessary in order to do anything like common justice to those who inhabit the rural parts of this country, and whom, instead of seeing them, as we now see them, dwindle from one census to another, I, for my part, and I believe you, along with me, would heartily desire to see maintained, not in their present number only, but in increasing numbers over the whole surface of the land.

Let the Turks now carry away their abuses, in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province that they have desolated and profaned. This thorough riddance, this most blessed deliverance, is the only reparation we can make to those heaps and heaps of dead, the violated purity alike of matron and of maiden and of child; to the civilization which has been affronted and shamed; to the laws of God, or, if you like, of Allah; to the moral sense of mankind at large. There is not a criminal in a European jail, there is not a criminal in the South Sea Islands, whose indignation would not rise and over-boil at the recital of that which has been done, which has too late been examined, but which remains unavenged, which has left behind all the foul and all the fierce passions which produced it and which may again spring up in another murderous harvest from the soil soaked and reeking with blood and in the air tainted with every imaginable deed of crime and shame. That such things should be done once is a damning disgrace to the portion of our race which did them; that the door should be left open to their ever so barely possible repetition would spread that shame over the world!

The only means which have been placed in my power of "raising the wages of colliers" has been by endeavouring to beat down all those restrictions upon trade which tend to reduce the price to be obtained for the product of their labour, & to lower as much as may be the taxes on the commodities which they may require for use or for consumption. Beyond this I look to the forethought not yet so widely diffused in this country as in Scotland, & in some foreign lands; & I need not remind you that in order to facilitate its exercise the Government have been empowered by Legislation to become through the Dept. of the P.O. the receivers & guardians of savings.

At last, my friends, I am come amongst you. And I am come…unmuzzled.

I agree with you that a grave calamity overhangs the Liberal party in connection with the plan which I described to you in two peculiar monosyllabic epithets [mad and drunk]... Liberalism cannot put on the garb of Jingoism without suffering for it... [For sixty years my life has been] a constant effort to do all I could for economy & for peace; not the peace of this country only but of the world... it is not now economy but peace which supplies the key note of the situation... If the thing is to be done at all let it be done by those who think it right.

As the British Constitution is the most subtile organism which has proceeded from the womb and the long gestation of progressive history, so the American Constitution is, so far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off by the brain and purpose of man.

[The publication of The Jubilee of Free Trade is] an act of great gallantry for the Cobdenian faith is in all points at a heavy discount—Peace, Retrenchment, Free Trade and all the rest of it, to my great grief I must confess.

Letter to the Marchese di Rudinì (30 April 1892), quoted in Vilfedo Pareto, Liberté économique et les événements d'Italie (1970), p. 49

The Chancellor of the Exchequer should boldly uphold economy in detail; and it is the mark of a chicken-hearted Chancellor when he shrinks from upholding economy in detail, when because it is a question of only two or three thousand pounds, he says it is no matter. He is ridiculed, no doubt, for what is called candle-ends and cheese-parings, but he is not worth his salt if he is not ready to save what are meant by candle-ends and cheese-parings in the cause of the country. No Chancellor of the Exchequer is worth his salt who makes his own popularity either his consideration, or any consideration at all, in administering the public purse. In my opinion, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is the trusted and confidential steward of the public. He is under a sacred obligation with regard to all that he consents to spend.

[I was] a youth in his twenty third year, young of his age, who had seen little or nothing of the world, who resigned himself to politics, but whose desire had been for the ministry of God. The remains of this desire operated unfortunately. They made me tend to glorify in an extravagant manner and degree not only the religious character of the State, which in reality stood low, but also the religious mission of the Conservative party. There was, to my eyes, a certain element of AntiChrist in the Reform Act and that Act was cordially hated. ... It was only under the (second) Government of Sir Robert Peel that I learned how impotent [and] barren was the conservative office for the Church.

Not a drop of blood runs in my veins except Scotch blood, and a large share of my heart ever has belonged, and ever will belong, to Scotland.

There was no instalment of Free Trade, which need be taken into our account, before 1842. ... I therefore take 1843 as the first operative year of the first instalment of Liberal legislation under what was called the new Tariff. The second instalment was the new Tariff of 1845. The third instalment was the repeal of the Corn Laws at the opening of 1849, together with the repeal of the Navigation Laws during the Parliamentary Session of that year. The fourth was the new Tariff of 1853, accompanied with the repeal of the Soap Duties and other changes. The fifth and last great instalment was granted by the Customs Act of 1860, which at length gave nearly universal effect to the following principles:
1. That neither on raw produce, nor on food, nor on manufactured goods, should any duty of a protective character be charged.
2. That the sums necessary to be levied for the purposes of revenue in the shape of Customs duty should be raised upon the smallest possible number of articles.

Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home.

I am fundamentally a dead man: one fundamentally a Peel–Cobden man.