I read with regret that the authorities intend to remove the statue of Gordon from Trafalgar Square and send it down to Sandhurst. I hope the decisio… - G. M. Trevelyan

Our formidable factions, for all their nonsense and violence, served to protect the liberty of the subject. It is only in States based on the less civilized principle that no party may exist save the party of government, that liberty of press and person can be totally destroyed, whether in the Eighteenth or the Twentieth Century. That is not the English tradition.

The Charter was regarded as important because it assigned definite and practical remedies to temporary evils. There was very little that was abstract in its terms, less even than later generations supposed.... A King had been brought to order, not by a posse of reactionary feudalists, but the community of the land under baronial leadership; a tyrant had been subjected to the laws which hitherto it had been his private privilege to administer and to modify at will. A process had begun which was to end in putting the power of the Crown into the hands of the community at large.

Linguistic ignorance and racial isolation are our greatest national dangers in the new era opened out by the War. We can no longer stand apart from Europe if we would. Yet we are untrained to mix with our neighbours, or even talk to them. Foreign policy is merely an outcome of our other international relations, and can only give official expression to our national ignorance or our national understanding of other races. The League of Nations is not a substitute for mutual understanding; rather it assumes that such understanding exists, and if that cannot soon be brought into existence, the League will fail, and with it the hopes of mankind.