John Russell, 1st Earl Russell Quotes (1792-1878)

“His life spanned the change from aristocratic to middle class England, from the England of broad acres to the England of factory chimneys. Russell was the man of the transition, the link between the old order and the new, belonging to the old order by birth, carried over to the new order by his ideas. He was the last great Whig; he became the first Liberal. Russell, more than any other single man created the Victorian compromise; he made the England we know, or knew rather, the England that is vanishing before our eyes.”

“Lord John Russell—I believe you may take my word for it—has probably, from association, from tradition, from his own reading and study, and from his own just and honest sympathies, a more friendly feeling towards this question of Parliamentary Reform than any other man of his order as a statesman.”

“My confidence in England rests partly on the honourable character of the statesmen to whose hands the reins of power are committed—on Lord John Russell and on Lord Palmerston. Lord John Russell, I will say it openly, at the risk of being considered more and more an Anglo-maniac, is the most liberal Minister in Europe.”

“Busied with the tattle of valets and waiting-maids, you accidentally omitted in your Memoirs of the Affairs of Europe all notice of its most vast and most rising empire. This luckless production closed your literary career; you flung down your futile pen in incapable despair; and, your feeble intellect having failed in literature, your strong ambition took refuge in politics.”

“A great reputation built itself up on the basis of splendid public services for thirty years; for almost twenty it has, I fear, been on the decline. The movement of the clock continues, the balance weights are gone.”

“The sham power Lord John Russell periodically wielded was not only sustained by the influence exerted by the family of the Duke of Bedford, whose younger son he was, but also by the absence of all the qualities which generally fit a person to rule over others. His Lilliputian views on everything spread to others like a contagion and contributed more to confuse the judgment of his hearers than the most ingenious misrepresentation could have done. His real talent consists in his capacity to reduce everything that he touches to his own dwarfish dimensions, to diminish the external world to an infinitesimal size and to transform it into a vulgar microcosm of his own invention. His instinct to belittle the magnificent is excelled only by the skill with which he can make the petty appear great.”

“As long as the abolition of slavery was not openly announced, as he thought it ought to have been, as one of the main objects of the war on the part of the Federals, he felt no warm sympathy with their cause. But after President Lincoln's proclamation it was quite different, and no man rejoiced with deeper thankfulness than he did at the final triumph of the Northern States, for no man held slavery in more utter abhorrence.”

“Heard poor old Ld Russell was dead, having died last night. He had been ill for the last 3 weeks, & his memory quite gone. He was nearly 86. A man of much talent, who leaves a name behind him, kind, & good, with a great knowledge of the constitution who behaved very well, on many trying occasions; but he was impulsive, very selfish (as shown on many occasions, especially during Ld Aberdeen's administration) vain, & often reckless & imprudent. He was a link with the past, & was one of my first Ministers 41 years ago.”