Impatient Idealism

We do not know who invented the phrase “Impatient Idealism.”  What we do know is that Lord Morley was among the first, if not the very first, among statesmen, to use the expression with reference to the mental attitude of a class of people in India. The passage in which he used the words is familiar to every student of political literature in this country, and it is well known that in speaking of the impatient idealist and the miscarriages by history due to him Lord Morley began by admitting that he had been an impatient idealist himself. It was in a very different sense that Sir E. A. Gait used the expression in his Convocation speech at Patna the other day.