William Ewart Gladstone on Daniel O'Connell

“It is, however, a misnomer to call him a demagogue. If I may coin a word for the occasion, he was an ethnagogue. He was not the leader either of plebs or populus against optimates: he was the leader of a nation; and this nation, weak, outnumbered, and despised, he led, not always unsuccessfully, in its controversy with another nation, the strongest perhaps and the proudest in Europe.”

“He was an Irishman, but he was also a cosmopolite. I remember personally how, in the first session of my parliamentary life [1833], he poured out his wit, his pathos, and his earnestness, in the cause of negro emancipation. Having adopted the political creed of Liberalism he was as thorough an English liberal, as if he had had no Ireland to think of. He had energies to spare for Law Reform, Postal Reform (a question of which he probably was one of few to discern at the time the greatness), for secret voting, for Corn Law Repeal, in short for whatever tended, within the political sphere, to advance human happiness and freedom.”