Churchill, Randolph Henry Spencer, Lord, 1849-1895
The Whigs are a class with the prejudices and the vices of a class;
the Radicals are a sect with the tyranny and the fanaticism of a
sect.... The Whigs tell you that the institutions of this kingdom,
as illustrated by the balance of Queen, Lords and Commons, and the
Established Church, are but conveniences and useful commodities,
which may be safely altered, modified, or even abolished, so long
as the alteration, modification, or abolition is left to the Whigs
to carry out. The Radicals tell you that these institutions are
hideous, poisonous, and degrading, and that the divine Caucus is
the only machine which can turn out, as if it was a patent
medicine, the happiness of humanity. But the Tories, who are of the
people, know and exclaim that these institutions, which are not so
much the work of the genius of man, but rather the inspired
offspring of Time, are the tried guarantees of individual liberty,
popular government, and Christian morality; that they are the only
institutions which possess the virtue of stability, of stability
even through all ages; that the harmonious fusion of classes and
interests which they represent corresponds with and satisfies the
highest aspirations either of peoples or of men; that by them has
our Empire been founded and extended in the past; and that by them
alone can it prosper or be maintained in the future. Such is the
Tory party and such are its principles, by which it can give to
England the government she requires--democratic, aristocratic,
Parliamentary, monarchical, uniting in an indissoluble embrace
religious liberty and social order. And this party--this Tory party
of to-day--exists by the favour of no caucus, nor for the selfish
interests of any class. Its motto is--‘Of the people, for the
people, by the people’; unity and freedom are the beacons which
shed their light around its future path and amid all political
conflict this shall be its only aim--to increase and to secure
within imperishable walls the historic happiness of English homes.
(Blackpool, January 24, 1884.)
Again and again in these years of strife Lord Randolph Churchill
returned to this central idea:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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