William Ewart Gladstone

“ For this concentration of power, toil, and liability, milder realities have now been substituted; and Ministerial responsibility comes between the Monarch and every public trial and necessity, like armor between the flesh and the spear that would seek to pierce it; only this is an armor itself also fleshy, at once living and impregnable. It may be said, by an adverse critic, that the Constitutional Monarch is only a depository of power, as an armory is a depository of arms; but that those who wield the arms, and those alone, constitute the true governing authority. ”

“ This is the function of the British Cabinet. It is perhaps the most curious formation in the political world of modern times, not for its dignity, but for its subtlety, its elasticity, and its many-sided diversity of power. It is the complement of the entire system; a system which appears to want nothing but a thorough loyalty in the persons composing its several parts, with a reasonable intelligence, to insure its bearing, without fatal damage, the wear and tear of ages yet to come. ”

“ A book, even Audubon (I believe the biggest known) , is smaller than a man; but, in relation to space, I entertain more proximate apprehension of pressure upon available space from the book population than from the numbers of mankind. We ought to recollect, with more of a realized conception than we commonly attain to, that a book consists, like a man, from whom it draws its lineage, of a body and a soul. They are not always proportionate to each other. ”

“ When these reasonable expectations fail, then, it must be admitted, the British Constitution will be in danger.
Apart from such contingencies, the offspring only of folly or of crime, this Constitution is peculiarly liable to subtle change. Not only in the long run, as man changes between youth and age, but also, like the human body, with a quotidian life, a periodical recurrence of ebbing and flowing tides. Its old particles daily run to waste, and give place to new. ”

“ The Turks are what circumstances have made them, and depend upon it that if a lot of us were taken and put in their circumstances we, either individually or as a race, would soon cease to do even the limited credit to the Christian name that we now bring to it. They exercise a perfectly unnatural domination over their fellow-creatures; and arbitrary power is the greatest corruptor of the human mind and heart. ”

“ And the bookcase must be housed. And the house must be kept. And the library must be dusted, must be arranged, should be catalogued. What a vista of toil, yet not unhappy toil! Unless indeed things are to be as they now are in at least one princely mansion of this country, where books, in thousands upon thousands, are jumbled together with no more arrangement than a sack of coals; where not even the sisterhood of consecutive volumes has been respected; where undoubtedly an intending reader may at the mercy of Fortune take something from the shelves that is a book ”

“ And the gradual extinction of Paganism, associated as it had been with intellect, and art, and every energy of worldly life, must have removed a formidable cause of jealousy.
Around the origins of the movement there might naturally gather, in an age that had but imperfect command either of communication, or of transmission, matter of a legendary character. We cannot, therefore, be greatly surprised at the beliefs long received that Charlemagne added to his other glories the honour of having founded the University of Paris, and that our own Alfred nursed the infancy of Oxford. ”

“ I submit, then, whether it would not be better to attempt the great and practical measures to which I have alluded, than to introduce a topic which, besides failing of any beneficial effect, will divert the attention of Parliament from measures which involve no violation of principle, are in unison with the act abolishing slavery, and would prove, if carried, of incalculable benefit to the negro. ”

“ There is here lacking an amalgam, a reconciling power, what may be called a clearing-house of political forces, which shall draw into itself every thing, and shall balance and adjust every thing, and ascertaining the nett result, let it pass on freely for the fulfilment of the purposes of the great social union. Like a stout buffer-spring, it receives all shocks, and within it their opposing elements neutralize one another. ”

“ It is not the fact, that their religion is different from ours, which prevents them from discharging civil duties. Do not suppose that for a moment. It is not because they are in themselves so much worse than we are. God forbid that we should judge them. It is that this wretched system under which they live puts into their hands power which human beings ought not to possess, and the consequences are corruption to themselves and misery to those around. ”

“ Whether, as some think, the idea of an University in its comprehensive fulness has always been, or has not, an essentially Christian conception, it cannot, I suppose, be open to an historic doubt that the central idea of our ancient English Universities is an idea essentially Christian [50] . It is nowhere more simply, and nowhere more nobly, conveyed than in the motto of Oxford, Dominus illuminatio mea. ”

“ Noble works ought not to be printed in mean and worthless forms, and cheapness ought to be limited by an instinctive sense and law of fitness. The binding of a book is the dress with which it walks out into the world. ”

“ In the ordinary administration of the government, the Sovereign personally is, so to speak, behind the scenes; performing, indeed, many personal acts by the Sign-manual, or otherwise, but, in each and all of them, covered by the counter-signature or advice of Ministers, who stand between the august Personage and the people. There is, accordingly, no more power, under the form of our Constitution, to assail the Monarch in his personal capacity, or to assail through him, the line of succession to the Crown, than there is at chess to put the king in check. ”

“ It is extremely difficult for us to know the state of our own country. We know it but very imperfectly, although we have the assistance of a Press which is organised to the very highest degree, and although we have the aid which we derive from the invaluable privilege of public discussion, inherited from our forefathers, and never more valued than at present. In Turkey, on the other hand, we are dealing with a country in a state that is in some respects semi-barbarous, and in some respects worse than barbarous—meaning by the term barbarous a country in a very early stage of social progress. ”

“ So far, then, it would appear that the energies of Oxford have more largely taken effect than those of Cambridge in the world of action, as it is distinguished from the world of thought.
But we have been dealing with the ecclesiastical sphere alone. I incline to believe that in the province of lay life, once narrower but now wider by much, and ever widening more and more, we might arrive at the same comparative result. But the process of inquiry is far more arduous; and the relation between the lay life of the country and the Universities is far more difficult to trace. ”

“ The one is a thing grown, the other a thing made; the one a praxis, the other a poiesis: the one the offspring of tendency and indeterminate time, the other of choice and of an epoch. But, as the British Constitution is the most subtle organism which has proceeded from the womb and the long gestation of progressive history, so the American Constitution is, so-far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man. ”

“ The business of our government is to preserve property, to preserve order, to prevent each man from injuring his neighbour, to promote education, and knowledge of religion, to guard the sanctity of the family, and, above all, the sanctity and honour of women. ”

“ Passing from a narrow island to a continent almost without bounds, the colonists at once and vitally altered their conditions of thought as well as of existence, in relation to the most important and most operative of all social facts, the possession of the soil. In England, inequality lies embedded in the very base of the social structure; in America it is a late, incidental, unrecognized product, not of tradition, but of industry and wealth, as they advance with various and, of necessity, unequal steps. ”

“ My desire this evening is to do something, as far as time permits, towards providing my hearers with a clearer view of the interior condition of Turkey than is commonly possessed at present, and likewise to do something towards bringing home to the public mind that which is by many most strongly felt—namely, that down to the present moment, in the case of the people, in the case even of statesmen, aye, and very often in the case of travellers, who went to the East and who came back lamentably deficient of information, we all have been too much in the dark as to the real state of affairs. ”

“ The nicest of all the adjustments involved in the working of the British Government is that which determines, without formally defining, the internal relations of the Cabinet. On the one hand, while each Minister is an adviser of the Crown, the Cabinet is a unity, and none of its members can advise as an individual, without, or in opposition actual or presumed to, his colleagues. On the other hand, the business of the State is a hundred-fold too great in volume to allow of the actual passing of the whole under the view of the collected Ministry. ”

“ In the face of the country, the Sovereign and the Ministers are an absolute unity. The one may concede to the other; but the limit of concessions by the Sovereign is at the point where he becomes willing to try the experiment of changing his Government, and the limit of concessions by the Minister is at the point where they become unwilling to bear, what in all circumstances they must bear while they remain Ministers, the undivided responsibility of all that is done in the Crown's name. But it is not with the Sovereign only that the Ministry must be welded into identity. ”