Lawyers From England

"If we pass on an unsustainable environment to our children we have failed them."

"THe engaged Party have laid the Axe to the very root of Monarchy and Parliaments; they have caſt all the Myſteries and ſecrets of Government, both by Kings and Parliaments, before the vulgar, (like Pearl before Swine) and have taught both the Souldiery and People to look ſo far into them as to ravel back all Governments, to the firſt principles of nature: He that ſhakes Fundamentals, means to take down the Fabrick. Nor have they been careful to ſave the materials for Poſterity. What theſe negative Statiſts will ſet up in the room of theſe ruined buildings, doth not appear, only I will ſay, They have made the People thereby so curious and so arrogant, that they will never find humility enough to submit to a civil rule;; their aim therefore from the beginning was to rule them by the power of the Sword, a military Ariſtocracy or Oligarchy, as now they do. Amongſt the ancient Romans, Tentare arcana Imperii, to prophane the Myſteries of State, was Treaſon; becauſe there can be no form of Government without its proper Myſteries, which are no longer Myſteries than while they are concealed. Ignorance, and Admiration ariſing from Ignorance are the Parents of civil devotion and obedience, though not of Theological."

"It is a general rule of Judgment, that a mischief should rather be admitted than an inconvenience."

"He the robe of justice wore, Sully'd not, as heretofore, When the magistrate was sought With yearly gifts. Of what avail Are guilty hoards? for life is frail; And we are judg'd where favour is not bought."

"I should have all manner of tenderness for the right of the College; they are nurseries of Religion and Learning, and therefore all donations for increase and augmentation of their revenue are to be liberally expounded."

"God forbid that Judges upon their oath should make resolutions to enlarge jurisdiction."

"There is no instance where men are so easily imposed upon, as at the time of their dying under the pretence of charity."

"My lords, we are vertebrate animals, we are mammalia! My learned friend's manner would be intolerable in Almighty God to a black beetle."

"After a hard frost a man might wake in the morning and find he was breaking a covenant."

""As the crow flies"—a popular and picturesque expression to denote a straight line."

"If a man go into the London Docks sober without means of getting drunk, and comes out of one of the cellars very drunk wherein are a million gallons of wine, I think that would be reasonable evidence that he had stolen some of the wine in that cellar, though you could not prove that any wine was stolen, or any wine was missed."

"Common sense still lingers in Westminster Hall."

"An enactment for the favour and liberty of the subject ought to have a liberal construction."

"In the eye of the law no doubt, man and wife are for many purposes one: but that is a strong figurative expression, and cannot be so dealt with as that all the consequences must follow which would result from its being literally true."

"There is no presumption in this country that every person knows the law: it would be contrary to common sense and reason if it were so."

"Nominal damages are in effect, only a peg to hang costs on."

"Fictions of law must be consistent with justice."

"You silly old fool, you don't even know the alphabet of your own silly old business."

"Music is the medicine of a troubled mind."

"And grant that a man read all the books of music that ever were wrote, I shall not allow that music is or can be understood out of them, no more than the taste of meats out of cookish receipt books."

"Oh, Sussex, Sussex by the sea! Good old Sussex by the Sea! You may tell them all that we stand or fall For Sussex by the sea!"

"The scene was more beautiful far to the eye Than if day in its pride had arrayed it."

"And o'er them the lighthouse looked lovely as hope,— That star of life's tremulous ocean."

"Thomas Hughes, the author of “Tom Brown at Rugby,” has written a little book called “The Manliness of Christ” It would be an excellent thing if our young men became sufficiently interested in this book to read it."

"Yes, that new world, through the golden gates of which they had passed together, which is the old, old world after all, and nothing else. The same old and new world it was to our fathers and mothers as it is to us, and shall be to our children — a world clear and bright, and ever becoming clearer and brighter to the humble, and true, and pure of heart, to every man and woman who shall live in it as the children of the Maker and Lord of it, their Father. To them, and to them alone, is that world, old and new, given, and all that is in it, fully and freely to enjoy. All others but these are occupying where they have no title; "they are sowing much, but bringing in little; they eat, but have not enough; they drink, but are not filled with drink; they clothe themselves, but there is none warm; and he of them who earneth wages earneth wages to put them into a bag with holes." But these have the world and all things for a rightful and rich inheritance; for they hold them as dear children of Him in whose hands it and they are lying, and no power in earth or hell shall pluck them out of their Father's hand."

"The consciousness of the darkness in one and around one brings the longing for light. And then the light dawns; through mist and fog, perhaps, but enough to pick one's way by." He stopped a moment and then added, "and shines ever brighter unto the perfect day."

"[I]n this life-long fight, to be waged by everyone of us as single-handed against a host of foes, the last requisite for a good fight, the last proof and test of our courage and manfulness, must be loyalty to truth — the most rare and difficult of all human qualities. For such loyalty, as it grows in perfection, asks ever more and more of us, and sets before us a standard of manliness always rising higher and higher."

"There's always a voice saying the right thing to you somewhere, if you'll only listen for it."

"It was because you were out of sorts with the world, smarting with the wrongs you saw on every side, struggling after something better and higher and sympathizing with the poor and weak, that I loved you. We should never have been here, dear, if you had been a young gentleman satisfied with himself and the world, and likely to get on well in society."

"Christ's whole life on earth was the assertion and example of true manliness — the setting forth in living act and word what man is meant to be, and how he should carry himself in this world of God — one long campaign in which the "temptation" stands out as the first great battle and victory."

"Young men are pretty much like a drove of sheep; any one who takes a decided line on certain matters, is sure to lead all the rest."

"From behind the shadow of the still small voice — more awful than tempest or earthquake — more sure and persistent than day and night — is always sounding full of hope and strength to the weariest of us all, "Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.""

"[W]hat will not a delicately nurtured British lady go through when her mind is bent either on pleasure or duty?"

"Women, to be very attractive to all sorts of different people, must have great readiness of sympathy. Many have it naturally, and many work hard in acquiring a good imitation of it. In the first case it is against the nature of such persons to be monopolized for more than a very short time; in the second all their trouble would be thrown away if they allowed themselves to be monopolized. Once in their lives, indeed, they will be, and ought to be, and that monopoly lasts, or should last for ever; but instead of destroying in them that which was their great charm, it only deepens and widens it, and the sympathy which was before fitful, and, perhaps, wayward, flows on in a calm and healthy stream, blessing and cheering all who come within reach of its exhilarating and life-giving waters."

"Heaven, they say, protects children, sailors, and drunken men; and whatever answers to Heaven in the academical system protects freshmen."

"Blessed are they who have the gift of making friends, for it is one of God's best gifts. It involves many things, but, above all, the power of going out of one's self and appreciating whatever is noble and loving in another."

"For the credit of muscular Christianity, one must say that it was not her weight, but the tumult in his own inner man, which made her bearer totter. Nevertheless, if one is wholly unused to the exercise, the carrying a healthy young English girl weighing a good eight stone, is as much as most men can conveniently manage."

"[T]he least of the muscular Christians has hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief, that a man's body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men. He does not hold that mere strength or activity are in themselves worthy of any respect or worship, or that one man is a bit better than another because he can knock him down or carry a bigger sack of potatoes than he."

"As regards the principle of the Bill, I, for one, am entirely in accord with it... Why, it is the great principle of the "three acres and a cow" which we fought out at the Election of 1885. ... The principle of the Bill, as I take it, is to be this—that the Local Authority is to have power by compulsion to acquire land for the advantage of the community in letting it out, or otherwise disposing of it to individuals. ... This was the great charge of Socialism which was brought against my right hon. Friend the Member for West Birmingham; but, happily, we are all Socialists now."

"Socialism is the legitimate and inevitable corollary of Mr. Bright's doctrine. If want is the crime of the Government, then the duty of the Government must be to provide against want. This is Socialism pure and simple. It begins with national workshops, and ends with what Mr. Carlyle calls a "whiff of grapeshot." Mr. Bright may pretend to direct his attacks against the aristocracy alone, but it is the possessors of capital, the employers of labour, the great middle class of this country who have real cause to dread his revolutionary language."

"If there be any party which is more pledged than another to resist a policy of restrictive legislation, having for its object social coercion, that party is the Liberal party. (Cheers.) But liberty does not consist in making others do what you think right, (Hear, hear.) The difference between a free Government and a Government which is not free is principally this—that a Government which is not free interferes with everything it can, and a free Government interferes with nothing except what it must. A despotic Government tries to make everybody do what it wishes; a Liberal Government tries, as far as the safety of society will permit, to allow everybody to do as he wishes. It has been the tradition of the Liberal party consistently to maintain the doctrine of individual liberty. It is because they have done so that England is the place where people can do more what they please than in any other country in the world."

"We are supreme and irresistible in our force. We can do what we like. We can crush these Dutchmen in the Transvaal, and you will have to crush the Dutchmen all over South Africa. You may send out a corps d'armée and you can do that; of that there is no doubt. But that, I hope, is not the question. For us it is not what we can do, but what is right we should do and what we ought to do. That is the only supremacy which I claim for the English nation."

"It is this practice of allowing one set of people to dictate to another set of people what they shall do, what they shall think, what they shall drink, when they shall go to bed, what they shall buy, and where they shall buy it, what wages they shall get and how they shall spend them, against which the Liberal party have always protested."

"As militant pamphleteer Harcourt was of the first order—as good as Junius or Swift or Bolingbroke, in weight, scorn, directness, trenchant stroke. When any ecclesiastical pretensions irritated the Erastianism that was the deepest and most undying of his political tenets, his pen made prelates and their crosiers shake."

"Harcourt had many advantages as a speaker: a commanding presence, a classical style, a caustic humour, considerable erudition, and a wide knowledge of affairs. I heard him make many powerful speeches, but he was not naturally eloquent. I doubt if he ever moved an audience either to deep feeling or to tears—which might serve as a definition of oratory; and he failed to convince his hearers of sincerity or conviction—an impression which was encouraged by some of the circumstances of his political career. In satire, raillery, and scorn, not always highly refined, he was proficient. I remember calling upon him once in his rooms at Cambridge, where he was Professor of International Law, in 1879. He handed me a copy of a speech in this vein which he had just delivered at Southport in Lancashire—a place I was later to represent in Parliament—with the remark: "That speech will make me Home Secretary in the next Administration"—and so it did. Though he was very effective in improvised retort,—more so I think than when prepared—he became in later years so much a slave to his MS., that he lost all appearance of spontaneity."

"His literary knowledge gave a fine flavour to his speeches, and he made by far the best adaptation of a quotation that I heard in the House of Commons."

"Harcourt was the last of that long train of reasoners, debaters, orators, law-makers, great from Somers and Sir Robert Walpole onwards. New elements of feeling were edging their way into the public mind. The old plain, hard, secular, commonsense, after the Reform Bill of 1832 had revolutionised the foundations of parliamentary aristocracy, has become deepened and enriched, but changed. Harcourt was the last stout-hearted representative of the parliamentary polity of a long and not inglorious era."

"Roses are shining in Picardy In the hush of the silver dew; Roses are flowering in Picardy But there's never a rose like you. And the roses will die with the summer time And our roads may be far apart, But there's one rose that dies not in Picardy; 'Tis the rose that I keep in my heart."

"Oh, we'm come up from Somerset, Where the cider apples grow, We'm come to see your Majesty, An' how the world do go. And when you're wanting anyone, If you'll kindly let us know, We'll all come up from Somerset, Because we loves you so!"

"I stand in a land of roses, But I dream of a land of snow, Where you and I were happy, In the years of long ago."