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
It is not, however, in matters of law only. We have been busy in
alienating the sympathies of free peoples. The free Slavonic peoples
of the East of Europe--the people of Roumania, the people of
Montenegro, the people of Servia, the people of Bulgaria--each and all
of these have been painfully taught in these last few years to look
upon the free institutions of this country as being for them a dream,
as being, perhaps, for the enjoyment of this country, but not as
availing to animate a nation with a generous desire to extend to
others the blessings they enjoyed themselves. In other times--it
was so when Mr. Canning was the Minister of this country, when Lord
Palmerston was the Minister of this country, when Lord Clarendon was
the Minister of this country at the Foreign Office--it was well known
that England, while regardful of her own just interests, and while
measuring on every occasion her strength and her responsibility,
yet was willing to use and willing to find opportunities for giving
cordial aid and sympathy to freedom; and by aid and sympathy many a
nation has been raised to its present position of free independence,
which, without that sympathy, would probably never have attained to
such a height in the order of civilization. The sympathies of free
people ought to be a dear and precious object of our ambition.
Ambition may be a questionable quality: if you give a certain meaning
to the phrase, it ill comports with the Christian law. But there
is one sense in which ambition will never mislead men; that is the
ambition to be good, and the ambition to do good in relieving from
evil those who are grievously suffering, and who have not deserved the
evils they endure: that is the ambition which every British statesman
ought to cherish. But, as I have said, for the last two years
especially--and even for more than two years--more or less, I
think, during the whole active period of the foreign policy of the
Beaconsfield Administration--the sympathies of these now free peoples
of the East have been constantly more and more alienated; and except,
perhaps, in a single case which I am glad to cling to--the single
and isolated case of Eastern Roumania--except this case, the whole
strength of England, as far as they have been conversant with it, has
been exercised for the purpose of opposing their best interests.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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