Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 549 pages of information about Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914.

Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 549 pages of information about Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914.
which 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advice to Naples, which was not received in the submissive spirit expected from her, and our Minister was therefore withdrawn.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 view, the depraved,

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Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.