Translators From The United Kingdom

"Now the Victorian Age, or the nineteenth century as a whole, was a great moral reformer... It proclaimed that men, even courtiers and noblemen, ought not to be drunken or dissolute or even corrupt, that politics were really concerned with the welfare of the people, that the rich had duties towards the poor. The transition from George IV and his unpleasing brothers to the young Queen and the Prince Consort was typical of a much wider change. When Lord Palmerston was caught chasing a maid of honour into her bedroom, the excuse made for him was: "Your Majesty should remember that he is a very old gentleman and accustomed to the manners of the late Court"."

"There was a re-birth of public spirit. Gentlemen ceased to take bribes. Justice became incorruptible... It has been observed that up to about 1820 the laws passed by Parliament had almost all been for the protection of the privileged few against the many; after that time they are predominantly for the protection of the nation as a whole against abuse and privilege. Instead of the ferocious defence of property, a spirit of sympathy and help to the oppressed begins to inspire legislation. The old revolutionary doctrine of the infinite perfectibility of mankind, which had set on fire the enthusiasm of Godwin, Shelley and Condorcet, passed in a milder and more reasonable form into the general imagination of the age."

"Whether or no man might be made perfect, he certainly might be made better and happier than he is; and the conscious pursuit of that object became an accepted source of inspiration to politics and literature. With it went the conception that the necessary condition of the pursuit was freedom: set man free, let him have room to move and external conditions which do not starve or cramp him, and human nature of itself will strive to rise higher. This spirit shows itself in almost all the best English fiction of the period, from romantics like the Brontës, and realists, like George Eliot, to satirists, like Dickens and Thackeray. It had been utterly lacking in Fielding and Smollett, and even in Jane Austen. It shows itself in the immense increase of charitable institutions, of religious missions, of societies for the education of the people. There is no question of hypocrisy. To suppose there is, is the mere petulance of jealously. Shelley's or Gladstone's love of moral improvement was just as genuine as Falstaff's love of sack. But an age of moral earnestness seems in our own day to have been succeeded by an age of relaxation; and one can see in, for instance, such a book as Mr. Strachey's Eminent Victorians that the moral earnestness of Gladstone or Dr. Arnold is felt by the author to be a hateful quality and not easily to be forgiven."

"[T]he Victorian Age... cared more for life than for thought; consequently it produced abundant and fine life, while its thought was comparatively unambitious and aimed mainly at serving the practical purposes of life. It cared intensely for morals and little for metaphysics; a good deal for religion and scarcely at all for theology... It had an immense faith, a faith in goodness, in duty, in the future of mankind."

"There ought to be some sanction behind international law, and the League of Nations is there to supply it... The problem is not how to concentrate somewhere sufficient force to quell a peace-breaker—that already exists; it is to produce a general state of mind in which the possessors of force will really use it for maintaining the general peace and not merely for supporting their own interests."

"[I]f we lay at all too much stress on the need of warlike preparations for quelling the peace-breaker, we find ourselves on a very slippery slope. ... It is all a perpetuation of war, not a planting of peace: a hardening in old error, not a change of heart. One of the most advanced French advocates of the League once said to me that the true guarantee of peace in Europe was a strong French Army and a strong British Navy. The sort of man who thinks that is the sort of man who ought never to be allowed to touch international affairs. Remove that implication. Accept freely, and put into practice, the principles of genuine and equal Disarmament, and then your preparation for Sanctions is perfectly right. To put crushing Sanctions in the hands of two particular Powers, or of an alliance of certain highly armed Powers, would be a crime against humanity."

"The real difficulty of the situation lies in the practical working of the coercion. Let it be laid down that the League as a whole will take the necessary action, economic or military. Well and good; but the League is not a military or economic unit and possesses no central executive. It is a society of independent sovereign states, their independence somewhat modified by treaty obligations and a habit of regular conference, but none the less real. I doubt whether the League as a League could declare war or wage war. The force would have to be supplied by each state separately, of its own deliberate will. ... One cannot expect Siam or Canada to mobilize because one Balkan state attacks another. And if the duty is not incumbent on all members, who is to decide what members are to undertake it? The Council has no absolute authority. No nation will be eager to subject itself to the strain and sacrifice of coercive action unless its own interests are sharply involved. But the question is whether, in a world that increasingly detests war and mistrusts force as a instrument of international policy, the various national Parliaments or Governments will in general have sufficient loyalty to the League, sufficient public spirit and sense of reality, to be ready to face the prospects of war not in defence of their own frontiers or immediate national interests, but simply to maintain the peace of the world."

"It is hard on many people, on naval and military circles, on Philistine newspapers, on smart society in London, just as it is hard on similar circles in Berlin, to have to give up their favourite dreams and admit themselves definitely defeated, defeated even in the Tory Cabinet, by dull middle-class pacifism. ... all parties are pledged to the League...all Prime Ministers and ex-Prime Ministers support it...no candidate for Parliament dares to oppose it openly."

"In sum it seems to me that the Covenant, though not without certain ambiguities and loop-holes, is on the whole a wonderfully successful instrument, flexible, comprehensive, and exactly directed to the main evil which it was desired to cure. It does aim straight at the heart of the international anarchy; and it does so by a method which is calculated to stir up the very minimum of opposition. Its normal sanction is the public opinion of the world; its most effective weapon publicity. You cannot punish a nation; you cannot even coerce by force any moderately strong nation. But you can exert a very severe pressure on even the strongest to mend its ways by simply putting a question to its representative at the Assembly, or at one of the permanent Commissions, and publishing its reply."

"The Commonwealth is the Sermon on the Mount reduced to political terms."

"The great War was certainly not caused by financial interests. ... All the international financiers that I know are terrified of war and revolution, and anxious for things to work as smoothly as possible."

"I do not think that war has much to with capitalism and socialism."

"I am one of those many millions who believed, and believe still, that, amid all sorts of confusions and inconsistencies, the World War was on our part essentially a fight for justice in international relations, as against naked Machpolitik; an attempt, in Mr. Gladstone's words, to “establish public right as the common law of Europe.” If the League of Nations stands, the War will have been justified, or at least compensated; if it comes to nothing, our whole action will have been a series of vain cruelties and blunders."

"[T]he action of Italy towards Abyssinia threatens us with a catastrophe. ... One member of the League is openly planning against another member, under the eyes of all Europe, aggression of the most extreme kind, and is claiming the right actually to prohibit any consideration of the matter by the League. If the League submits there is no law left between nations. The Covenant is gone. ... I do not see what will be left of the Covenant, or what will remain to show that the Great War was anything but a battle of kites and crows, if Signor Mussolini is allowed to set his will above the law and make war as if no League existed."

"I am always a little surprised at the common habit of attributing “the failure of the League” to small defects in the Covenant or to the timidities of the French and British Governments in 1931 and after; the primary cause was obviously the disunion of the Great Powers on whose union everything depended. America withdrew; Japan turned traitor and was too strong to coerce; Italy after a period of blackmail went over to the enemy. Whether Britain and France together might still have saved the situation is of course open to doubt; I am disposed to think they could, but one must not forget how great the difficulties were."

"The Victorian Age was in its essence liberal, a time of continuous progress in humanity, in enlightenment, in the welfare of the masses; a time in which an aristocracy was, on the whole, in power but was continually resigning its privileges or extending them to classes hitherto excluded. The statesmen of that time thought of themselves not as leaders of a class, but rather as ‘Shepherds of the People’, concerned with the good of the flock but somewhat aloof from it. Men like Peel and Gladstone made a definite impression of greatness, both in character and intellect, and Asquith was emphatically in the same tradition."

"The great men of that time agreed with Burke that petty thoughts go ill with a great empire, and that greatness in thought brings with it naturally some dignity of expression. On the famous occasion when Neville Chamberlain announced that ‘Hitler had missed the bus’, I happened to be listening with Granville Barker, and Barker murmured: ‘Asquith would never have said that’. Limehouse and Liverpool and post-war habits have accustomed us to a more colloquial idiom, which may be easier for an uneducated audience to follow, but does, I think, unconsciously lower the tone of thought."

"I am pleased with the election result. Nearly all the educated people I meet are Liberal, but vote Conservative."

"[I had] signed the letter of protest against Britain joining the war [but] then doubted, and was finally convinced the other way by Grey's speech on August 3rd [1914]."

"Of course I cannot work as I did. Still, there has never been a day, I suppose, when I have failed to give thought to the work for peace and for Hellenism. The one is a matter of life and death for all of us; the other of maintaining amid all the dust of modern industrial life our love and appreciation of eternal values."

"First it is a question of International Law. The UN was intended to have a means of enforcing the law. It has no such means. Egypt and Israel have been breaking the law for 9 years without correction. Secondly, the Nasser danger is much more serious than a local friction. The real danger is we should be faced by a coalition of Arab, Muslim and anti-Western states, led nominally by Egypt but really by Russia. ... Such a danger, the Prime Minister saw, must be stopped."

"To the spirit of the New China this book is dedicated in the sure belief that her future greatness lies in the knowledge and emulation of her ancient and immortal arts."

"Aristotle found support for his thesis in facts drawn from geopolitics or ‘natural law’. Greek superiority had to be proved demonstrably innate, a gift of nature. In one celebrated fragment he counsels Alexander to be ‘a hegemon [leader] of Greeks and a despot to the barbarians, to look after the former as after friends and relatives, and to deal with the latter as with beasts or plants’."

"In less than four years he had transformed Macedonia from a backward and primitive kingdom to one of the most powerful states in the Greek world."

"...for the first time he [Philip] began to understand how Macedonia's outdated institutions of feudalism and aristocratic monarchy, so despised by the rest of Greece, might prove a source of strength when dealing with such opponents."

"Macedonia as a whole tended to remain in isolation from the rest of Greece..."

"Do not doubt him who tells you he is afraid, but be afraid of him who tells you he has no doubts."