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H. H. Asquith Quotes

Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith, , generally known as H. H. Asquith, was a British statesman of the Liberal Party who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1908 to 1916. He was the last Prime Minister to lead a majority Liberal government and played a central role in the design and passage of major liberal legislation and a reduction of the power of the House of Lords. In August 1914, Asquith took Great Britain and the British Empire into the First World War. In 1915 his government was vigorously attacked for the shortage of munitions and the naval failure at Gallipoli. He formed a coalition government with the other parties but failed to satisfy critics. He was forced to resign in December 1916 and was succeeded by David Lloyd George, a fellow Liberal who became his bitter enemy in battles to control the Liberal Party.

Asquith's father owned a small business but died when Asquith was seven. Asquith was educated at City of London School and Balliol College, Oxford. He trained as a barrister and after a slow start to his career achieved great success. In 1886, he was adopted as Liberal candidate for East Fife, a seat he held for over thirty years. In 1892, he was appointed as Home Secretary in Gladstone's fourth ministry, remaining in the post until the Liberals lost the 1895 election. In the decade of opposition that followed, Asquith became a major figure in the party, and when the Liberals regained power under Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman in 1905, Asquith was named Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1908, Asquith succeeded him as Prime Minister, with David Lloyd George as Chancellor.

With their first majority government since the 1880s, the Liberals were determined to advance their agenda. An impediment to this was the unelected House of Lords, dominated by the Conservatives. When Lloyd George proposed, and the House of Commons passed, the People's Budget of 1909, the Lords rejected it. Meanwhile the South Africa Act 1909 passed. Asquith called an election for January 1910, and the Liberals won, though were reduced to a minority government.

Although the Lords then passed the budget, Asquith was determined to reform the upper house, and following the general election in December 1910 gained passage of the Parliament Act 1911, allowing a bill three times passed by the Commons in consecutive sessions to be enacted regardless of the Lords. Asquith was less successful in dealing with Irish Home Rule. Repeated crises led to gun running and violence, verging on civil war.

Asquith's action in taking the country to war was one of the most important individual ministerial decisions of modern times; he did it with Britain united and with the postponement of the issues of Ireland and women's suffrage. He assisted Britain's ultimate success in the war through his early decisions on national mobilisation; the despatch of the British Expeditionary Force to the Western Front, the creation of a mass army, and the development of an industrial strategy designed to support the country's war aims.

But Asquith's technique of acting as mediator among talented cabinet members such as Lloyd George and Winston Churchill was less effective in war than in peace, and setbacks in the war effort forced him to form a coalition government with the Conservatives and Labour early in 1915. Bitter rivalries inside and between the three major parties worsened when Asquith was unable to forge the coalition into a harmonious team. It was weakened by his own indecision over strategy, conscription, and financing. Lloyd George organised his overthrow and replaced him as Prime Minister in December 1916.

Asquith remained as leader of the Liberal Party, but was unable to quell the internal conflict. The party rapidly declined in popularity and was ruined by the 1918 general election. Asquith accepted a peerage in 1925 and died, aged 75, in 1928. His role in creating the modern British welfare state has been celebrated, but his weaknesses as a war leader and as a party leader after 1914 have been highlighted by historians.

✵ 12. September 1852 – 15. February 1928
H. H. Asquith photo
H. H. Asquith: 26   quotes 0   likes

Famous H. H. Asquith Quotes

“We had better wait and see.”

H. H. Asquith

Phrase used repeatedly in speeches in 1910; see [Jenkins, Roy, w:Roy Jenkins, Asquith, A Trial of Statesmanship I, 1964]

“Perhaps the House will allow me to add this: that I am afraid we must brace ourselves to confront one of those terrible events in the order of Providence which baffle foresight, which appall the imagination and make us realise the inadequacy of words to do justice to what we feel. We cannot say more at this moment than to give a necessarily imperfect impression of our sense of admiration that the best traditions of the sea seem to have been observed and that willing sacrifices were offered to give the first chance for safety to those who were least able to help themselves, and of the heartfelt sympathy of the whole nation to those who find themselves suddenly bereaved of their nearest and dearest.”

H. H. Asquith

Address to the House of Commons on the sinking of the RMS Titanic; see [Asquith Voices Sympathy, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9A02E3DF153CE633A25754C1A9629C946396D6CF, 16 April 1912, The New York Times]

“We shall never sheathe the sword, which we have not lightly drawn”

H. H. Asquith

Speech at Guildhall, 9 November 1914; see
Context: We shall never sheathe the sword, which we have not lightly drawn, until Belgium recovers in full measure all, and more than all, that she has sacrificed; until France is adequately secured against the menace of aggression; until the rights of the smaller nationalities of Europe are placed upon an unassailable foundation; and until the military domination of Prussia is wholly and finally destroyed.

“If I am asked what we are fighting for I reply in two sentences: In the first place, to fulfil a solemn international obligation, an obligation which, if it had been entered into between private persons in the ordinary concerns of life, would have been regarded as an obligation not only of law but of honour, which no self-respecting man could possibly have repudiated. I say, secondly, we are fighting to vindicate the principle which, in these days when force, material force, sometimes seems to be the dominant influence and factor in the development of mankind, we are fighting to vindicate the principle that small nationalities are not to be crushed, in defiance of international good faith, by the arbitrary will of a strong and overmastering Power. I do not believe any nation ever entered into a great controversy – and this is one of the greatest history will ever know – with a clearer conscience and a stronger conviction that it is fighting, not for aggression, not for the maintenance even of its own selfish interest, but that it is fighting in defence of principles the maintenance of which is vital to the civilisation of the world.”

H. H. Asquith

Address to the House of Commons on the declaration of war with Germany; see [Asquith, 6 August 1914, http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/asquithspeechtoparliament.htm, British Prime Minister's Address to Parliament]

“In view of this grave and unprecedented outrage, the House may be assured that his Majesty's Government will take without delay appropriate steps to vindicate the authority of the law and to protect officers and servants of the King and his Majesty's subjects in the exercise of their duties and in the enjoyment of their legal rights.”

H. H. Asquith

Speech in the House of Commons on the gun-running at Larne, Ireland (27 April 1914), quoted in The Times (28 April 1914), p. 8
Prime Minister

“What is the use of talking of Empire if here, at its very centre, there is always to be found a mass of people stunted in education, prey to intemperance, huddled and congested beyond the possibility of realising in any true sense either social or domestic life”

H. H. Asquith

Jenkins R, Mr. Balfour s Poodle, p.11
Undated

H. H. Asquith Quotes about laws

“More important still, perhaps, the sanctity of treaties and of the public law of Europe has been finally vindicated; and last, and most important of all, we have set up in the League of Nations a new international polity which promises, if it is given free scope and full authority, first to bring about progressive disarmament, and next to provide in future a rational and humane substitute for the ruinous arbitrament of war.”

H. H. Asquith

Speech in Paisley (6 February 1920), quoted in Speeches by The Earl of Oxford and Asquith, K.G. (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1927), p. 266
Later life

“Peace we all desire. Peace can only come—peace, I mean, that is worth the name and that satisfies the definition of the word—peace will only come on terms that atonement is made for past wrongs, that the weak and downtrodden are restored, that the faith of treaties is observed, and that the sovereignty of public law is securely enthroned over the nations of the world.”

H. H. Asquith

Speech https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1916-12-19/debates/8572103d-700a-487a-8dd1-c0a99679cc6d/PrimeMinisterSStatement in the House of Commons (19 December 1916)
Later life

“In dealing with an opponent who has openly repudiated all the restraints, both of law and of humanity, we are not going to allow our efforts to be strangled in a network of juridical niceties. We do not intend to put into operation any measures which we do not think to be effective, and I need not say we shall carefully avoid any measures which violate the rules either of humanity or of honesty. Subject to those two conditions I say to our enemy—I say it on behalf of the Government, and I hope on behalf of the House of Commons—that under existing conditions there is no form of economic pressure to which we do not consider ourselves entitled to resort.”

H. H. Asquith

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1915/mar/01/success-of-allies-assured#column_600 in the House of Commons (1 March 1915)
Prime Minister

H. H. Asquith Quotes

“They are confronted in Ireland with a situation which is largely due to their own lack of insight and of sympathy, confronted with a situation which needed strong and firm handling, strong and firm, but at the same time and above all, just, even-handed, and dispassionate. They have let loose this orgy of reprisals which confuse the innocent and the guilty in a common tumult of lawless violence. They deny, they prevaricate, they cloak and screen and block the avenues to truth in a childish belief that when order has been restored, a cowed and subjugated people will spread out grateful hands to grasp the boon of pinchbeck Home Rule. I say deliberately that never in the lifetime of the oldest among us has Great Britain sunk so low in the moral scale of nations. That, at any rate, when most of the members of the Coalition are forgotten, will be an achievement which will be remembered in history.”

H. H. Asquith

Speech in the Euston Theatre, London (19 February 1921), quoted in Speeches by The Earl of Oxford and Asquith, K.G. (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1927), p. 289
Later life

Home , Time , History , Strong

“The military domination of Prussia, with all that it involved to the fortunes of the secular struggle between force upon the one side and right upon the other, that domination has been once and for all and for ever overthrown.”

H. H. Asquith

Speech in Paisley (6 February 1920), quoted in Speeches by The Earl of Oxford and Asquith, K.G. (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1927), p. 265
Later life

“Some of the great results of the war, if they are adequately realized, are in complete harmony with what for ages past have been Liberal aims and ideals. I mean, for instance, the abolition of militarism; I mean the progressive disarmament of the civilized peoples of the world; I mean the recognition for small states as well as for great States of the principle of self-determination. ... And it means, above all, or ought to mean...a conversion of the old State system with its precarious equipoise of power, with its shifting alliances and combinations, with its infinite opportunities for the achievements of selfish ambition and territorial aggrandizement, it means the conversion of that into a true international democratic polity, a system of Government under which there will be equal rights and equal power to all States whatever their size.”

H. H. Asquith

Speech in Paisley (28 January 1920), quoted in Speeches by The Earl of Oxford and Asquith, K.G. (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1927), p. 245
Later life

Selfishness , War , Past , People

“Is Germany prepared not only to evacuate Belgium, not only to make full reparation for the colossal mischief and damage which have accompanied her devastating occupation of the country, and her practical enslavement, so far as she can carry it out, of large portions of the population...but to restore to Belgium not the pretence of liberty, but complete and unfettered and absolute independence?”

H. H. Asquith

Speech in the House of Commons (26 July 1917), quoted in The Times (27 July 1917), p. 10
Later life

Making love , Country

“We shall never sheathe the sword, which we have not lightly drawn, until Belgium recovers in full measure all, and more than all, that she has sacrificed; until France is adequately secured against the menace of aggression; until the rights of the smaller nationalities of Europe are placed upon an unassailable foundation; and until the military domination of Prussia is wholly and finally destroyed.”

H. H. Asquith

Speech at the Guildhall, London (9 November 1914), see [Swatridge, Colin, Oxford Guide to Effective Argument and Critical Thinking, https://books.google.com/books?id=fGbrAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT51, 2014, Oxford University Press, 978-0-19-165180-9, 51]
Prime Minister

“I have realised from the first that if it could not be proved that social reform (not Socialism) can be financed on a Free Trade line, a return to Protection is a moral certainty.”

H. H. Asquith

Letter to John Strachey (9 May 1908), quoted in H. C. G. Matthew, The Liberal Imperialists: The Ideas and Politics of a Post-Gladstonian Élite (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 257
Prime Minister

“Wonderful news to-day, and it is only a question of time when we shall sweep this country.”

H. H. Asquith

Remark to Margot Asquith (16 May 1903) after reading in the The Times Joseph Chamberlain's speech advocating protectionism, quoted in The Autobiography of Margot Asquith, Volume Two (London: Penguin, 1936), p. 46
Opposition MP

Question , Time , Country

“So far from enjoying the undisputed hegemony which was so confidently predicted for British trade 50 years ago, there was not now an inch of ground in any one of the international markets for which we were not fighting with all our available strength. We had long ceased to enjoy that relative superiority in natural advantages with which we started upon the race.”

H. H. Asquith

Speech in Leeds (23 November 1900), quoted in The Times (24 November 1900), p. 8
Opposition MP

Fight , Self-confidence , Confidence , Nature

“Let them take the debate which had recently been carried on with so much vivacity on the subject of Imperial expansion. There was a process of expansion which was as normal, as necessary, as inseparable, and unmistakable a sign of vitality in a nation as the corresponding processes in the growing human body. We might control and direct it by oversight and by means adapted to the end, but we could not arrest it. ... it was not part of the most illustrious apostles and disciples of Liberalism to condemn expansion in the sense which he had described it.”

H. H. Asquith

Speech in Darwen, Lancashire (27 January 1899), quoted in The Times (28 January 1899), p. 8
Opposition MP

Sense , Parting

“I...say to my working-men friends here, before you forsake your support and allegiance to the Liberal party, and before you go trying to found some separate organization of your own, let me venture to put before you two considerations. In the first place I would beg of you to remember that in English public life and in English history we have hitherto always had parties which did not represent, or which, at any rate, did not profess to represent, particular classes, but which looked at the interests of the community from the point of view of the community as a whole.”

H. H. Asquith

Speech in Hull (22 January 1895), quoted in The Times (23 January 1895), p. 6
Home Secretary

History , Support , Communication , Life

“[T]he bond which united them, if their critics were to be believed, might be a tranquil consciousness of effortless superiority.”

H. H. Asquith

Remarks to a dinner given to Asquith in the House of Commons by MPs who had graduated from Balliol College (22 July 1908), quoted in The Times (23 July 1908), p. 12
Prime Minister

“The severance of Ulster from the rest of Ireland is a geographical, and, therefore, a political impossibility. ... The Union is safe so long as Ulster is loyal.”

H. H. Asquith

‘The invasion of Ulster’, The Spectator (29 September 1883), p. 6

“[A] party requires party spirit, and party spirit is the product of a very complex sentiment, which is slow to grow and hard to sustain, and which thrives best where it can be nourished by historic memories.”

H. H. Asquith

‘The English Extreme Left’, The Spectator (12 August 1876), p. 8

Memory

“No, I will not. We shall wait and see.”

H. H. Asquith

Answer to an elector who asked him if he would say what he would do if the House of Lords rejected a Bill limiting their veto, in East Fife (20 January 1910), quoted in The Times (21 January 1910), p. 10

Phrase used repeatedly in speeches in 1910; see [Jenkins, Roy, w:Roy Jenkins, Asquith, A Trial of Statesmanship I, 1964]
Prime Minister

Waiting

“...one thing is certain, that the Budget of next year will stand at the very centre of our work, by which, I was going to say, we shall stand or fall, by which certainly we shall be judged in the estimation both of the present and of posterity.”

H. H. Asquith

Speech to the National Liberal Club (11 December 1908), quoted in The Times (12 December 1908), p. 10
Prime Minister

“...a return to more thrifty and economical administration [is] the first and paramount duty of the Government.”

H. H. Asquith

Budget speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1906/apr/30/expenditure in the House of Commons (30 April 1906)
Chancellor of the Exchequer

“...where we were obliged to part company with our friends was here—that we held and still hold that war was neither intended nor desired by the Government and the people of Great Britain, but that it was forced upon us without adequate reason, entirely against our will.”

H. H. Asquith

Speech in the Liverpool Street Station Hotel, London (20 June 1901) on the Boer War, quoted in Speeches by The Earl of Oxford and Asquith, K.G. (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1927), p. 40
Opposition MP

War , People , Parting

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