The Battle of Dorking Quotes

“When I look at my country as it is now - its trade gone, its factories silent, its harbours empty, a prey to pauperism and decay - when I see all this, and think what Great Britain was in my youth, I ask myself whether I have really a heart or any sense of patriotism that I should have witnessed such degradation and still care to live!”
― George Tomkyns Chesney, The Battle of Dorking

“After all the bitterest part of our reflection is, that all this misery and decay might have been so easily prevented, and that we brought it about ourselves by our own shortsighted recklessness.”
― George Tomkyns Chesney, The Battle of Dorking

“But our people could not be got to see how artificial our prosperity was-that it all rested on foreign trade and financial credit; that the course of trade once turned away from us, even for a time, it might never return; and that our credit once shaken might never be restored.”
― George Tomkyns Chesney, The Battle of Dorking

“They could not understand that the times had altogether changed, that the Crown had really no power, and that the Government merely existed at the pleasure of the House of Commons, and that even Parliament-rule was beginning to give way to mob-law.”
― George Tomkyns Chesney, The Battle of Dorking