Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914
History
Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914
Great Britain -- Foreign relations; Speeches, addresses, etc., English
we have a nice account that will never be settled, while we have
engagements to maintain that respectable but diminutive country under
its present constitutional government. Then, leaving the kingdom of
Greece, we pass up the eastern end of the Mediterranean, and from
Greece to the Red Sea, where-ever the authority of the Sultan is more
or less admitted, the blood and the industry of England are pledged to
the permanent sustentation of the 'independence and integrity' of the
Ottoman Empire.
I confess that, as a citizen of this country, wishing to live
peaceably among my fellow countrymen, and wishing to see my countrymen
free, and able to enjoy the fruits of their labour, I protest against
a system which binds us in all these net-works and complications, from
which it is impossible that we can gain one single atom of advantage
for this country. It is not all glory, after all. Glory may be worth
something, but it is not always glory. We have had within the last few
years dispatches from Vienna and from St. Petersburg which, if we had
not deserved them, would have been very offensive and not a little
insolent. We have had the Ambassador of the Queen expelled summarily
from Madrid, and we have had an Ambassador driven almost with ignominy
from Washington. We have blockaded Athens for a claim which was known
to be false. We have quarrelled with Naples, for we chose to give
advice to Naples, which was not received in the submissive spirit
expected from her, and our Minister was therefore withdrawn. Not three
years ago, too, we seized a considerable kingdom in India, with which
our Government had but recently entered into the most solemn treaty,
which every lawyer in England and in Europe, I believe, would consider
binding before God and the world. We deposed its monarch, we committed
a great immorality and a great crime, and we have reaped an almost
instantaneous retribution in the most gigantic and sanguinary revolt
which probably any nation ever made against its conquerors. Within the
last few years we have had two wars with a great Empire, which we are
told contains at least one-third of the whole human race. The first
war was called, and appropriately called, the Opium War. No man, I
believe, with a spark of morality in his composition, no man who
cares anything for the opinion of his fellow countrymen, has dared to
justify that war. The war which has just been concluded, if it has
been concluded, had its origin in the first war; for the enormities
committed in the first war are the foundation of the implacable
hostility which it is said the inhabitants of Canton bear to all
persons connected with the English name. Yet though we have these
troubles in India--a vast country which we do not know how to
govern--and a war with China--a country with which, though everybody
else can remain at peace, we cannot--such is the inveterate habit of
conquest, such is the insatiable lust of territory, such is, in my
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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