great merchants, and great speculators, not running in a stream merely down your principal streets, but turning fertilizing rivulets into every by-lane and every alley, tends so powerfully to promote the comfort, happiness, and contentment of a nation?  Do you not know that all progress comes from successful and peaceful industry, and that upon it is based your superstructure of education, of morals, of self-respect among your people, as well as every measure for extending and consolidating freedom in your public institutions?  I am not afraid to acknowledge that I do oppose—­that I do utterly condemn and denounce—­a great part of the foreign policy which is practised and adhered to by the Government of this country.

You know, of course, that about 170 years ago there happened in this country what we have always been accustomed to call ’a glorious revolution’, a revolution which had this effect:  that it put a bit into the mouth of the monarch so that he was not able of his own free-will to do, and he dared no longer attempt to do, the things which his predecessors had done without fear.  But if at the Revolution the monarchy of England was bridled and bitted, at the same time the great territorial families of England were enthroned; and from that period, until the year 1831 or 1832—­until the time when Birmingham politically became famous—­those territorial families reigned with an almost undisputed sway over the destinies and the industry of the people of these Kingdoms.  If you turn to the history of England, from the period of the Revolution to the present, you will find that an entirely new policy was adopted, and that while we had endeavoured in former times to keep ourselves free from European complications, we now began to act upon a system of constant entanglement in the affairs of foreign countries, as if there were neither property nor honours, not anything worth striving for, to be acquired in any other field.  The language coined and used then, has continued to our day.  Lord Somers, in writing for William III, speaks of the endless and sanguinary wars of that period as wars ’to maintain the liberties of Europe’.  There were wars to ‘support the Protestant interest’, and there were many wars to preserve our old friend ’the balance of power’.

We have been at war since that time, I believe, with, for, and against every considerable nation in Europe.  We fought to put down a pretended French supremacy under Louis XIV.  We fought to prevent France and Spain coming under the sceptre of one monarch, although, if we had not fought, it would have been impossible in the course of things that they should have become so united.  We fought to maintain the Italian provinces in connexion with the House of Austria.  We fought to put down the supremacy of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the Minister who was employed by this country at Vienna, after the Great War, when it was determined that no Bonaparte should ever again sit on the throne