Edward Smith-Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby Quotes

In me you will find one ready to assist in removing all blemishes and deformities from the best and holiest institutions of the country with the most uncompromising zeal—while, at the same time, I will oppose, with all the might and energy of which I am capable, those whose measures, whose objects, and whose intentions are not to reform, but to destroy. (Vehement and long-continued cheering.)

Bored to the utmost power of extinction.

My Lords, these are the aristocracy of this country to whom I allude. Reduce these men, and you inflict an irretrievable and irreparable injury upon the country. Lower them in the scale, and you have deranged the social machine beyond the power of correction. God forbid that the successful manufacturer or that the princely merchant should not take his place among the landed aristocracy of this country! Such infusions add fresh vigour and power to that class of the community; but depend upon it, if you sweep that class away at once with all the associations attached to their names, their families, their histories, and the previous associations which belong to the character of their families, and substitute a new body of capitalists, to come amidst an unattached tenantry, and a neighbourhood where no associations are connected with their names, their moral influence and effect will be irretrievably lost.

I am convinced that the old and stubborn spirit of Toryism is at last yielding to the increased liberality of the age—that Tories of the old school—the Sticklers for inveterate abuses under the name of the wisdom of our ancestors, the "laudatores temporis acti," are giving way on all sides—that the spirit which supported the Holy Alliance, the friend of despotism rather than the advocate of struggling freedom, is hastening to the fate it merits, and that all its attendant evils are daily becoming matters which belong to history alone.

Peel's great error has always been disregarding the opinion of his party, whenever it did not exactly square with his own; and I am confident that no man in these days can hope to lead a party who cannot make up his mind sometime to follow it.

I will venture to give one word by way of advice, and to express a hope that the study of the ancient classics will not be abandoned when they are no longer compulsory. Believe me, that to the man who wishes to study politics, or the art of persuasion, nothing can be more necessary than to imbue his mind with the spirit of the ancient poets and historians, that he may be able to infuse into his own arguments and compositions, and to draw from that pure and crystal fountain, some of the copious diction, high sentiment, and masculine thought, which so eminently distinguished those great men, but whom there is no hope of successfully rivalling.

We shall, doubtless, have divers declamations in praise of liberty, which no man wishes to gainsay; but the question is—is it from a state of liberty that Ireland is to be rescued? Is she not to be rescued from a state of great and severe tyranny? Is she not to be rescued from a state of anarchy, where life has no safety, and property no security? Liberty is something more than a name, and the benefits of liberty are the protection of life and property—the protection of every man in doing that which pleases himself, and is not detrimental to society. This is liberty and its benefits; and it is not liberty for a people to do justice neither to themselves nor to their neighbours, but to be subjected to the authority of self-constituted regulators.

Well, what are these real principles of free trade? They are, to dismiss every useless and unprofitable hand; they are to employ no men beyond those who are absolutely required to make a profit to their employer... I do not believe that under the pressure of the greatest difficulty the landlords of England as a body would adopt, even for their own protection, the cold and selfish and calculating doctrines of political economy and free trade.

It is a bungling fisherman who strikes at the first nibble; I shall wait till my fish has gorged the bait and then I am sure to land him.

But this he must say, and he said it in a voice of warning and counsel...that if they relaxed in their endeavours, if they became lukewarm in their support of the church; if, while they admitted, and supported, and encouraged the reform of the church and the removal of abuses, they relaxed and flinched from the first principles by which that church was maintained and upheld, they had an adversary ever vigilant to take advantage of the slightest concession, ever watching for an unwise admission, ever desirous to entrap them into the adoption of some insidious expression which would afterwards be used against them in a different sense, and ever ready to assault and to assail everything they held most sacred.

You are the trustees for far more than your personal interests; you are the trustees for your country, you are the trustees for posterity, you are the trustees for the Constitution of the Empire. My Lords, you each, and all of you, live amongst your neighbours, by whom you are looked up to as the guides for their political opinions; from you your neighbours take the colour of their opinions and their views; to you they look, to your opinions a respectful deference is paid, and it is you who have encouraged and promulgated the opinion that for the great interests of the country agricultural protection is essential.

[I]f you search the records of our history from the earliest times, you will find in the most distinct form, from the preambles of successive statutes in successive ages, that the principle which guided the Ministers of this country was, the principle of encouraging the domestic industry and protecting the agriculture of this country.

Now, destroy this principle of protection, and I tell you in this place that you destroy the whole basis upon which your Colonial system rests. My Lords, if you do not know the advantages of your Colonies, Napoleon Bonaparte knew them well. It is by your Colonial system, based upon the principles of protection, that you have extended your arms—I do not mean your military arms, I mean your commercial arms—to every quarter and to every corner of the globe. It is to your Colonial system that you owe it that there is not a sea on which the flag of England does not float; that there is not a quarter of the world in which the language of England is not heard; that there is not a quarter of the globe, that there is no zone in either hemisphere, in which there are not thousands who recognize the sovereignty of Britain—to whom that language and that flag speak of a home, dear, though distant, of common interests, of common affections—men who share in your glories—men who sympathize in your adversities, men who are proud to bear their share of your burdens, to be embraced within the arms of your commercial policy, and to feel that they are members of your great and imperial Zollverein.

The time is very critical—the game is, I believe, in our hands; but in order to be played with ultimate success, it must be played honestly and manfully, and to take office with the purpose of throwing over, voluntarily, the main object of those who have raised us to it is to follow too closely an exemplar vitiis imitabile, to which I never can submit.