In England there is little or no general objection to freedom of opinion so long as it is a question merely of opinion. We may know that a man holds free-thinking opinions, but we feel no wish to inflict any manner of punishment or deprivation on him so long as he keeps his opinions to himself and does not endeavor to make them prevail with others. This, however, was what John Morley had got into the way of doing. When he felt a strong conviction on any subject which seemed to him important, he always endeavored to justify his faith by argument and to bring others round to his views of the question. I can well remember that many of Morley's admirers and friends were but little gratified when it was first made known that he intended to seek for a seat in the House of Commons. Their impression was that he was just then doing in effective and admirable style the very kind of work for which he was best qualified, and that it was a pity he should run the risk of marring such a career for the sake of entering a political field in which he might possibly win no success, and in which success, even if won, would be poor compensation for the sacrifice of better work. Morley, however, seems to have made up his mind, even at an early period of his career, that he would try his chance in Parliament. So long ago as 1865 he became a candidate for a constituency in the North of England, but was not successful; and in 1880, after he had won genuine celebrity by his biography of Edmund Burke, that of Voltaire, that of Rousseau, and other books of the same order, he became a candidate for the great metropolitan division of Westminster. Here again he was unsuccessful, and it was only in 1883 that he first obtained a seat in the House of Commons as the representative of Newcastle-on-Tyne. I can well remember listening with the deepest interest to his maiden speech in the House of Commons. The general impression of the House was that the speech would prove a failure, for only too many members had already made up their minds, according to the usual fashion of the day, that a successful literary man was not likely to become a Parliamentary success. There was a common impression also that, despite his great gifts as a writer and his proved capacity as a journalist and editor, John Morley must be an impracticable sort of person. He had been at one time well known as an associate of the famous Positivist order of thinkers--the order to which men like Frederic Harrison and Richard Congreve belonged. The average member of Parliament could see no chance for a disciple of that school, which this average member regarded merely as a group of dreamers, to make any mark in a practical assembly where the routine business of legislation had to be carried on. Morley's speech was, however, a distinct and unmistakable success.