Convention, of the manner in which we have asserted for ourselves a principle that we had denied to others—­namely, the principle of over-riding the European authority of the Treaty of Paris, and taking the matters which that treaty gave to Europe into our own separate jurisdiction.  Now, gentlemen, I am sorry to find that that which I call the pharisaical assertion of our own superiority has found its way alike into the practice and seemingly into the theories of the Government.  I am not going to assert anything which is not known, but the Prime Minister has said that there is one day in the year—­namely, the 9th of November, Lord Mayor’s Day—­on which the language of sense and truth is to be heard amidst the surrounding din of idle rumours generated and fledged in the brains of irresponsible scribes.  I do not agree, gentlemen, in that panegyric upon the 9th of November.  I am much more apt to compare the 9th of November—­certainly a well-known day in the year—­but as to some of the speeches that have lately been made upon it, I am very much disposed to compare it with another day in the year, well known to British tradition; and that other day in the year is the 1st of April.  But, gentlemen, on that day the Prime Minister, speaking out,—­I do not question for a moment his own sincere opinion,—­made what I think one of the most unhappy and ominous allusions ever made by a Minister of this country.  He quoted certain words, easily rendered as ’Empire and Liberty’—­words (he said) of a Roman statesman, words descriptive of the State of Rome—­and he quoted them as words which were capable of legitimate application to the position and circumstance of England.  I join issue with the Prime Minister upon that subject, and I affirm that nothing can be more fundamentally unsound, more practically ruinous, than the establishment of Roman analogies for the guidance of British policy.  What, gentlemen, was Rome?  Rome was indeed an Imperial State, you may tell me—­I know not, I cannot read the counsels of Providence—­a State having a mission to subdue the world; but a State whose very basis it was to deny the equal rights, to proscribe the independent existence, of other nations.  That, gentlemen, was the Roman idea.  It has been partially and not ill described in three lines of a translation from Virgil by our great poet Dryden, which run as follows: 

  O Rome! ’tis thine alone with awful sway
  To rule mankind, and make the world obey,
  Disposing peace and war thine own majestic way.

We are told to fall back upon this example.  No doubt the word ‘Empire’ was qualified with the word ‘Liberty’.  But what did the two words ‘Liberty’ and ‘Empire’ mean in a Roman mouth?  They meant simply this—­’Liberty for ourselves, Empire over the rest of mankind’.