According to my observation, the change in my own generation is different. They have ceased either to trust or to distrust liberty, and have come to … - John Morley

[T]here is nothing that the most prominent men in the Liberal party more earnestly desire than that labour representation, direct labour representation, shall be as large as possible... It is sometimes said to me, "Oh! but you are against State intervention in matters of great social reform". At this time of the day it would be absurd for any man who has mastered all the Mining Regulations Acts, the Factories Acts, the great mass of regulation which affects trade; it would be absurd for any man to stand on a platform and say he was entirely against State intervention. I, for my part, have never taken that position... My own belief is that in the matters of hours and of wages for adult male labour the interference would be a bad and mischievous thing...that in such matters, for example, as housing of the poor and so forth, the proper machinery through which to carry out these operations is municipal and not Parliamentary.

The decrepitude that ended in the Latin conquest of Constantinople at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and the Mahometan conquest in the middle of the fifteenth, is an awkward reproof to the optimist superstition that civilized communities are universally bound somehow or another to be progressive.

‘Natural rights’...[is not] a true way of putting things—and certainly not the most useful and fertile way. Nature [is] simply the mastery of the strongest [and confers no rights on man]. Two savage tribes contend for a tract of land of wh. they are in need for their subsistence: nature gave the right to this land to the tribe wh. was strong enough to thrash the other. No right is worth a straw apart from the good that it brings: and all claims to rights must depend—not upon nature—but upon the good that the said rights are calculated to bring to the greatest number. General utility, public expediency, the greatest happiness of the greatest number—these are the tests and standards of a right; not the dictate of nature.