"You'd better try to do no good," was one of his dictums, "and then you'll get into no scrapes." Education at best was futile; education of the poor was positively dangerous.

The factory children?
"Oh, if you'd only have the goodness to leave them alone!" Free Trade was a delusion; the ballot was nonsense; and there was no such thing as a democracy.
Nevertheless, he was not a reactionary; he was simply an opportunist.
The whole duty of government, he said, was "to prevent crime and to preserve contracts." All one could really hope to do was to carry on.

He himself carried on in a remarkable manner--with perpetual compromises, with fluctuations and contradictions, with every kind of weakness, and yet with shrewdness, with gentleness, even with conscientiousness, and a light and airy mastery of men and of events.

He conducted the transactions of business with extraordinary nonchalance.

Important persons, ushered up for some grave interview, found him in a towselled bed, littered with books and papers, or vaguely shaving in a dressing-room; but, when they went downstairs again, they would realise that somehow or other they had been pumped.