"They are confronted in Ireland with a situation which is largely due to their own lack of insight and of sympathy, confronted with a situation which needed strong and firm handling, strong and firm, but at the same time and above all, just, even-handed, and dispassionate. They have let loose this orgy of reprisals which confuse the innocent and the guilty in a common tumult of lawless violence. They deny, they prevaricate, they cloak and screen and block the avenues to truth in a childish belief that when order has been restored, a cowed and subjugated people will spread out grateful hands to grasp the boon of pinchbeck Home Rule. I say deliberately that never in the lifetime of the oldest among us has Great Britain sunk so low in the moral scale of nations. That, at any rate, when most of the members of the Coalition are forgotten, will be an achievement which will be remembered in history."

“The socialization or nationalization of production and distribution and the extinction of what is called Capitalism—by whatever name the ideal, and the process for its attainment, is called—would starve the resources, and, in time, drain away the life-blood of the great productive industries which depend for their efficiency on the free play of initiative and enterprise. And Labour is becoming more and more a class organization, an expression and embodiment of what is called “class-consciousness.” That again was significantly illustrated in the general strike, which was directed by organized Labour, and which was countenanced—it is true, in a somewhat shamefaced fashion—by the Parliamentary Labour Party leaders.”

“The military domination of Prussia, with all that it involved to the fortunes of the secular struggle between force upon the one side and right upon the other, that domination has been once and for all and for ever overthrown.”

“In 1851 Harriet Martineau had just published a...“History of England during the Thirty Years' Peace”. The Great Exhibition of 1851...was about to open its doors and inaugurate what many people regarded as a new era of international concord. Industry was to be the recruiting sergeant of the future, and war, with its unproductive expenditure, with its futile hatreds and animosities, was to be superseded by the bloodless revolution of free competitors in the open markets of the world. For success in that new and pacific international struggle no nation was so well equipped as our own. We started with enormous advantages. Fifty years had passed. How did we stand to-day? The civilized world, which in 1851 seemed to be in the mood to send in its swords to be beaten into ploughshares, was now transformed into an armed camp; the 30 years' peace which Miss Martineau described had been succeeded by 50 years of almost continuous war.”

“Everyone desires outrages to cease, and its perpetrators, from whatever camp they proceed, to be detected and punished. But this cannot be too clearly said—it is possible for the State to pay too high a price for what is called the vindication of the law. The price is too high, far too high, when it involves the enthronement in the seat of justice of revenge, and the borrowing by the Executive of the criminals' own methods of indiscriminate robbery, arson, and murder.”

“Let us realize...that we are fighting as a united Empire in a cause worthy of the highest traditions of our race. ... let us recall the memories of the great men and the great deeds of the past, commemorated, some of them, as you have reminded us, in the monuments which we see around us on these walls, not forgetting the dying message of the younger Pitt, his last public utterance made at the table of your predecessor, my Lord Mayor, in this very hall: “England has saved herself by her exertions and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.” England in those days gave a noble answer to his appeal, and did not sheathe the sword until, after nearly twenty years of fighting, the freedom of Europe was secured. Let us go and do likewise.”

“he bond which united them, if their critics were to be believed, might be a tranquil consciousness of effortless superiority.”