Chief Secretaries For Ireland

"Present party designations have become empty of all contents...Vastly extended State expenditure, vastly increased demands from the taxpayer who has to provide the money, social reform regardless of expense, cash exacted from the taxpayer already at his wits' end—when were the problems of plus and minus more desperate? How are we to measure the use and abuse of industrial organization? Powerful orators find "Liberty" the true keyword, but the I remember hearing from a learned student that of "liberty" he knew well over two hundred definitions. Can we be sure that the "haves" and the "have-nots" will agree in their selection of the right one? We can only trust to the growth of responsibility; we may look to circumstances and events to teach their lesson."

"Finished Morley. A book worth having read. J.M.'s style at 80 is as bad as his style when Secretary for India was admirable. Doubt whether I can recover my sense of judicial appreciation after reading contemptuous reference by him to Keir Hardie. That reference, suggesting as it does that men, and parties and even the common people were but objects for comment and ways and means to experience intellectual and spiritual, destroys my hopes of genuine admiration. And yet he was something of a great head both to oppressed India and Ireland. Perhaps deep social resentment and revolutionary ardour take the form of aesthetic restlessness in a mind like J.M.'s."

"This is not a tragedy, but it means the disappearance of the last survivor of the heroic age. He was my first political mentor, and for more than fifty years a wise counsellor, the best of comrades, and in these last years an unfailing and devoted revered friend. Only last week I had from him an affectionate letter which I shall always treasure. English literature and the great traditions of public life are impoverished by his loss."

"As for Morley, he was never a good speaker, but he is a brilliant conversationalist. His fault in politics is that he's too negative."

"Since the death of Mr. Bradlaugh Mr. Morley was the most powerful exponent of individualism in the country... [E]very sensible man who had the future social welfare of his class at heart must be utterly opposed to Mr. Morley, who set his face against the collective ownership of land, the State ownership of railways, a legal eight hours day, and other questions of social legislation that would be useful to the community of workers."

"John Morley...should be mentioned here, not as an orator, for he would make no such claim, but as the last or almost the last exponent of the classical literary style. Just as his great Biography of Mr. Gladstone teems with splendid phrases, original without being extravagant, imaginative without being ornate, so in some of his platform speeches, delivered in the days when he addressed great popular audiences, the principles of his political creed were expounded in a garb that reminds one of the school of literary orators that ended with Canning and Macaulay. It was not rhetoric, because the sense was never sacrificed to the form, but it was an inspired form of spoken prose."

"The King...seems to have unburdened himself to Lord Morley. In the course of their discussions His Majesty pleased him greatly by observing that he looked upon him as the only representative of the old Whigs left in the Cabinet, and certainly, in so far as Whiggism is an attitude of mind, His Majesty's judgment was not wanting in acuteness."

"Lord Morley deplored Winston's Bradford speech... He took particular exception to the phrase “there are worse things than bloodshed,” which he described as “a platitude, and worse, a Tory platitude.” The subject cropped up at luncheon in Downing Street, when the Prime Minister instanced the enthusiasm with which the speech was received, and the cheers with which Winston was greeted in the House of Commons, as a proof that it corresponded to the feelings of the party. Lord Morley reminded them that a great Prime Minister, who once lived in that house, on being told of the popular delirium with which the declaration of war had been welcomed, replied, “They are ringing the bells now, but in no long time they will be wringing their hands.” He went on to say, so he told me, “You may talk as you like of bloodshed, but I venture to say this, that the first blood shed in Ireland, not in mere civil commotion, but in conflict between the Ulster Volunteers and the forces of the Crown, will mean the end of Home Rule.” Such a declaration from such a source has tremendous significance, but will it have much effect?"

"The menace of European war has come with startling abruptness. I received this afternoon the intimation that the Cabinet had decided to initiate the precautionary stage in the preparations for war. In a few minutes' talk I had with Lord Morley, I discovered that the step met with his keen disapproval, and that, upon its being followed by mobilisation, he would cease to incur further ministerial responsibility. Sympathetic as he is towards France in her secular struggle with Germany in the world of ideas, he cannot brook this country becoming a party to what he regards as a Slavonic movement against Teuton influence. Russia and all she stands for is still for him identified with barbarism, and he looks upon any tendency hostile to Germany that has its roots in Slav aspirations as prejudicial to the interests of civilisation."

"Twelve months ago you were below the gangway, now you are one of the foremost, most popular, most trusted leaders of the Party, after having discharged with signal ability and success the duties of the most difficult post in the Cabinet. I doubt whether our political history has any parallel for so swift, so sure, so well-deserved a rise. The future of the Liberal party will (if your life is spared), be coloured, influenced, controlled by you."

"I came across the articles written by John Morley in the Pall Mall Gazette during the Irish coercion period of Gladstone's Government. When read in sequence they seemed irresistible in their argument that coercion was not, under modern conditions, possible as a permanent system of governing Ireland. The only alternative was Home Rule. I was intellectually convinced: Morley seemed to be clear and consistent in his thought about Ireland."

"The best stroke the labour party could do would be to defeat Mr. Morley. He did not think Mr. Morley dishonest, or lacking in moral character or backbone, but his ideas were antagonistic to the new ideas which were beginning to find vent amongst the common people, and...it became a duty to prove to Mr. Morley and those who thought with him that the old school of Liberalism had had its day, and must now give place to the new... Mr. Morley was honest, but that was not everything. Mr. Morley was too much a man of the study, and was not in touch with his working-class fellows, and it was their sacred duty to try and bring about his defeat."

"If only Morley had let politics alone, he might have been the Gibbon of his age."

"The conversation passed into politics and particularly upon Germany, and I was astonished to find how “unrealistic” (as I thought) his views were about Germany's attitude (this was in 1909) and how far more he leaned towards Goethe than towards Comte. A three hours' talk with Morley was a delightful experience."

"It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the more typically English a writer on political or social problems then appeared to the world, the more is he to-day forgotten in his own country. Men like Lord Morley or Henry Sidgwick, Lord Acton or A. V. Dicey, who were then admired in the world at large as outstanding examples of the political wisdom of liberal England, are to the present generation largely obsolete Victorians."

"It is the end of a chapter and of a life which has consoled me more than anything else for the horrors, cruelties, and perversities of this hateful age with its false prophets and professional impostors, its office seekers, profiteers, wirepullers – all obsequious worshippers of Force, Popularity, and Pelf."

"Compromise, written by John Morley, Mill's favourite disciple, explores some of the subsidiary problems that revolve round the question how far self-respecting men may submit to false conventions and employ economies of truth in public and private life. Morley often told me that he intended Compromise to be a supplement to Mill's Liberty; and the two books have provided many of us with a philosophic faith."

"In his fascinating treatise On Compromise, John Morley pointed out that even a man who is convinced that his own opinions are right is not necessarily intolerant; and he might have added that even those who are intolerant in private life are not necessarily believers in public coercion or persecution. The Bolshevik threat — "Be my brother, or I slay thee" — is the sign of a weak, as well as of a ferocious faith. It only requires a little common sense and a little knowledge of the world to recognise the truth of the old adage — "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still." In Morley's words, "you have not converted a man because you have silenced him." Submission or acquiescence in a political system or a religious dogma when obtained by law, imprisonment, torture, threats or coercion of any kind "is as worthless and as essentially hypocritical as the conversion of an Irish pauper to Protestantism by means of soup tickets, or that of a savage to Christianity by the gift of a string of beads.""

"It was pleasant and interesting to be in almost daily intercourse with a friend with whom I had much in common, and whose conversation, when he was in the humour for it, was most agreeable to listen to. But he was not always in the humour, for, as his Parliamentary Under-Secretary, J. E. Ellis, said to me in describing him, he was "a man of moods." No truer word was ever spoken, and he had his bad days as well as his good ones. These variations in his temperature were naturally inconvenient, and made him less pleasant as a chief than he ought to have been: he was charming, but there was a sense of insecurity. Of all the Secretaries of State under whom I served he was the most intellectually brilliant, and, though he took to politics rather late in life, he had speedily raised himself to a conspicuous position; but he certainly was, in my opinion, born to be a thinker and a writer rather than a practical statesman and administrator."

"Politically, I suppose he was very far from me, and some of his Gods I hope never to revere. But he always talked from a full mind and a full heart. He liked the men who really count and the lamp of reason burned the more brightly for his presence. Some of his work seems to me very first rate — in literary criticism the essays on Macaulay and Carlyle, in political criticism those on Maine and Condorcet; the biographies of Voltaire and Diderot, the essays on Machiavelli and Robespierre. I have always liked the life of Cobden as a great picture of that era, and disliked the Gladstone as a tombstone rather than a book, though it has great occasions. As I look back the striking thing about the long hours I used to spend there was his wide and generous attitude to life. And many of his heroes were mine — especially Cromwell, Voltaire and Mill. And I think he did some great political work — Ireland, India and South Africa are all tributes to his insight."

"I do wish Morley had lived a few months longer to see MacDonald Prime Minister. The old man had talked of it so eagerly and so often."

"Morley was the last of the great, the true, Liberals."

"This inner conflict between the man of letters and the man of politics in Morley pursued and paralysed him all through his life."

"Christianity represents man as being by nature sinful, and the evils of the world as being due to the inherent imperfections in his nature. This doctrine Mr. Morley regards as entirely fatal to an efficacious doctrine of progress."

"Mr Morley has never entirely deserted literature for politics; he has brought his political training to bear on literature; witness his admirable studies of Sir Robert Walpole and of Oliver Cromwell, books which abound in wise saws and pregnant reflections that could never have been inspired in the study. They are the fine flower of political experience, ripened in the senate and the market-place, quickened by the habit of dealing directly with men, and perfected by rare literary skill."

"The effect of Peel's conduct in 1829 and 1846 has always seemed to me deplorable. The only person among our statesmen who has a right to propose a Home Rule Bill is Mr. John Morley."

"After my return to Parliament as member for Blackburn, my wife and I became friendly with Lord Morley, who was a native of the town. We often visited him at his house in Wimbledon, and our conversations with him remain among the happiest of our recollections. He was a charming conversationalist, and his penetrating comments on his political contemporaries were illustrating and fascinating."

"In the afternoon we journeyed down with Haldane to see Lord Morley, who for some unexplained reason desired to see us. We have never been on terms of friendship with John Morley. We have neither liked nor disliked him; and we have always assumed a similar attitude on his part. But it seems that in his political prime he was acutely aware of the socialist criticism of Gladstonian politics and deeply resented it. To-day he is a dignified, benevolent and infirm old man, pathetically anxious to make his peace with the new world of social democracy. In his old age he is more open-minded to the new thought than he was when he had the vigour to grasp its meaning. The catastrophe of the great war has compelled his pacifist soul to seek comradeship in the international socialist movement... As Sidney said goodbye he said wistfully “There is no malice between us?”—as if our visit had been one of reconciliation. We have been quite unconscious of any relationship—good or bad—between us and him."

"I submit that it is an Agreement that this country may not only be contented with, but proud of."

"Define it as we may, faith in Progress has been the mainspring of Liberalism in all its schools and branches."

"[I] always had a soft place in my heart for the patrician Whigs."

"I am, and always have been, a pretty strong individualist."

"I am a theorist, but I detest the introduction of abstract principles into the great practical difficulties of this nation."

"There has been a great deal of talk about raising class prejudice. I dislike class prejudice... There has been no feeling of class prejudice in my mind; but, my Lords, there is a worse thing than class prejudice, and that is race or national prejudice. We have not had much of it, in fact I may say almost none of it, here. Still is it not true that the cry which is going to be loudly invoked in this election, the Irish cry, depends upon race and national prejudice? Talk of class prejudice. The classes will take care of themselves, I trust. The English working man in my view—and I represented a great and important group of them for many years—is not in the least a Phrygian with a red cap, though some of his fellows may talk in that vein."

"Whether France or Italy or Germany or England has made the greatest contribution in the history of modern civilisation—however that speculative controversy may be settled, this at least is certain, that those are not wrong who hold that Germany's high and strict standard of competency, the purity and vigour of her administration of affairs, her splendid efforts and great success in all branches of science, her glories—for glories they are—in art and literature, and the fixed strength of character and duty in the German people entitle her national ideals to a supreme place among the greatest-ideals that now animate and guide the world. Do not let us forget all that. German ambition is a perfectly intelligible and even lofty ambition."

"The extreme advanced party is likely for the future to have on its side a great portion of the most highly cultivated intellect in the nation, and the contest will lie between brains and numbers on the one side, and wealth, rank, vested interest, possession in short, on the other."

"The new problem for statesmen will be not how the Queen's Government may be carried on, but how the National Will may be most promptly executed."

"If we survey the entire field of political action, we shall find that progress, wherever it is stayed, is stayed by the untimely relics of territorialism, and that in removing them we at once find ourselves led on to the true conditions by taking the policy of industry for our foundation. The industrial policy is emphatically the national policy... At nearly every point it is the superstition or sinister interest of the territorial power which thwarts, restrains, and depresses the harmonious adjustment of laws and administration to the needs of the public well-being."

"There is the Irish question... Underneath the surface of this, and wrapped up in it, are nearly all the controversies of principle which will agitate the political atmosphere for our time. It is a microcosm of the whole imperial question. It is the test of our fitness to deal with the other problems which modern circumstance, pressing hard against the old order of ideas and traditions, is forcing upon our attention. The functions of the State, the duties of property, the rights of labour, the question whether the many are born for the few, the question of a centralised imperial power, the question of the pre-eminence of morals in politics—all these things lie in Irish affairs."

"It is not for the candidates, but for the temper shown by the constituencies, that one may grieve, if there be matter for grief in the unmistakable proof which the elections are furnishing, that people do not recognise the necessity of giving supreme political power to supreme political intelligence."

"The evils of a military system, which, after all, every day must attenuate, are light compared with the evils of an anarchic conservatism reinstated in central Europe. Divided Germany means preponderating Russia. What can be more desirable in the interests of the highest civilisation than the interposition in the heart of the European state-system, of a powerful, industrious, intelligent, and progressive people, between the western nations and the half-barbarous Russian swarms? To the careful observer of the history of modern Europe it is plain that increasing vigour and self-conscious strength in Germany are other words for the spread eastwards of the best of those ideas, the most durable of those civilising elements, in which the difference of historic development has enabled England and France to anticipate her."

"In the American civil war partisanship with the sides there was the veil of a kind of civil war here. An unspoken instinct revealed to mutually hostile classes in England that their battle also was being fought in the contest between the free North and the slave-holding South. The triumph of the North, as has been often remarked, was the force that made English liberalism powerful enough to enfranchise the workmen, depose official Christianity in Ireland, and deal a first blow at the landlords."

"I shall not flinch if they decapitate or flagellate all the bishops and curés in Paris."

"Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat."

"Nature, in her most dazzling aspects or stupendous parts, is but the background and theatre of the tragedy of man."

"Household suffrage as yet is only a thing on paper. We have still to feel its reality. The new possessors of power are still hardly aware that it is theirs. And who are the new possessors of power? The skilled artisans, the leaders of trade societies, and the like? Alas, no; it is not they but those below them, those between the artisan and the pauper, who, whenever they choose to awake, or whenever they choose in their dreams to let somebody else lead them, hold the destinies of our society in their hands."

"The noble Earl, Lord Curzon, stated that he could not understand how it is that we, the Party who have always taken the side of people rightly struggling to be free, do not sympathise with Ulster. In all the cases that he named—Italy, Greece, and so forth—there was actual oppression and hateful misgovernment. No one says there is actual oppression or hateful misgovernment in Ulster. It is all hypothesis."

"History, as Treitschke contends, is first of all the presentation of res gestae, and of active statesmen. The essential things in the statesman are strength of will, courage, massive ambition, passionate joy in the result. It needs no wizard to see how such doctrine as this lends a hand to the sinister school of political historians, who insist that the event is its own justification; that Force and Right are one."

"I want to take in all these labour questions from the largest possible nationalist point of view, and it is this—that while the State should do all that it prudently can to protect the health and life, not only of women and children, but of the whole assembly of workers, it is absurd, it is perilous to thrust Acts of Parliament, as I have said before, like the steam ram-rod into the delicate machinery of commercial undertakings."

"I said years ago that I would rather be the man who helped on a rational scheme which should secure the comfort of old age than I would be a general who had won ever so many victories in the field. These are, to me, the two most tragic sights in the world—a man who is able to work, and anxious to work, and who cannot get work; and the other tragic sight is that of a man who has worked until his eyes have become dim, and his natural force has become abated, and he is left to spend the declining years of a life that has been so nobly used, so honourably used, in straits, difficulties, and hardships."