Representative British Orations Volume 3 (of 4): With Introductions and Explanatory Notes
History
Representative British Orations Volume 3 (of 4): With Introductions and Explanatory Notes
Speeches, addresses, etc., English
My fifth principle is this, gentlemen: to acknowledge the equal rights
of all nations. You may sympathize with one nation more than another.
Nay, you must sympathize in certain circumstances with one nation more
than another. You sympathize most with those nations, as a rule, with
which you have the closest connection in language, in blood, and in
religion, or whose circumstances at the time seem to give the strongest
claim to sympathy. But in point of right all are equal, and you have
no right to set up a system under which one of them is to be placed
under moral suspicion or espionage, or to be made the constant subject
of invective. If you do that, but especially if you claim for yourself
a superiority, a pharisaical superiority over the whole of them, then
I say you may talk about your patriotism if you please, but you are
a misjudging friend of your country, and in undermining the basis of
the esteem and respect of other people for your country you are in
reality inflicting the severest injury upon it. I have now given you,
gentlemen, five principles of foreign policy. Let me give you a sixth,
and then I have done.
And that sixth is: that in my opinion foreign policy, subject to all
the limitations that I have described, the foreign policy of England
should always be inspired by the love of freedom. There should be a
sympathy with freedom, a desire to give it scope, founded not upon
visionary ideas, but upon the long experience of many generations
within the shores of this happy isle, that in freedom you lay the
firmest foundations both of loyalty and order; the firmest foundations
for the development of individual character, and the best provision for
the happiness of the nation at large. In the foreign policy of this
country the name of Canning ever will be honored. The name of Russell
ever will be honored. The name of Palmerston ever will be honored by
those who recollect the erection of the kingdom of Belgium, and the
union of the disjoined provinces of Italy. It is that sympathy, not a
sympathy with disorder, but, on the contrary, founded upon the deepest
and most profound love of order,—it is that sympathy which in my
opinion ought to be the very atmosphere in which a foreign secretary of
England ought to live and to move.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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