“During these twelve months of anxiety and agitation, my Lord Mayor, I would take this opportunity of stating what have been the two great objects which Her Majesty’s Government have proposed with reference to those critical circumstances which have occurred since I had the honour of addressing your predecessor. The first has been the maintenance of the general peace of Europe, which involves almost every other consideration that may affect the interests of this country and the general welfare of humanity. We have believed that that peace would be best maintained by an observance of the treaties in which all the Great Powers of Europe have joined. Those treaties are not antique and dusty obsolete documents. They are not instruments devised under a state of circumstances different from those that exist, and ill adapted to the spirit of the age in which we live.... “... As the Lord Mayor has told us to-night, there is no country so interested in the maintenance of peace as England. Peace is especially an English policy. She is not an aggressive Power, for there is nothing that she desires. She covets no cities and no provinces. What she wishes is to maintain and to enjoy the unexampled Empire which she has built up, and which it is her pride to remember exists as much upon sympathy as upon force. But, although the policy of England is peace, there is no country so well prepared for war as our own. If she enters into conflict in a righteous cause--and I will not believe that England will go to war except for a righteous cause--if the contest is one which concerns her liberty, her independence, or her Empire, her resources, I feel, are inexhaustible. She is not a country that, when she enters into a campaign, has to ask herself whether she can support a second or a third campaign. She enters into a campaign which she will not terminate till right is done.” THE EASTERN QUESTION: FIERY SPEECHES AT ST. JAMES’S HALL (1876). =Source.=--_The Times_, December 9, 1876. THE DUKE OF WESTMINSTER: The worst Government now remaining in Europe is that of Constantinople, and it seems to us a most extraordinary thing that men in this country and a portion of the Press seem to think that the Turks have still a power of regeneration within themselves. We hear them say, and with some justice, that the Turks are peaceful citizens and warlike soldiers. The warlike qualities for which they are distinguished seem to me not the best calculated to work for the happiness and the contentment of the people under the fell sway of Turkish dominion....