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 o… - John Richard Green

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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.

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About John Richard Green

John Richard Green (12 December 1837 – 7 March 1883) was an English historian chiefly known for his 1874 work A Short History of the English People.

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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 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.

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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.

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