Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury Quotes

As to action the matter is simple: India is held by the sword: and its rulers must in all essentials be guided by the maxims which benefit the Government of the sword.

I believe...all the enduring institutions which human societies have attained have been reached, not of the set design and forethought of some group of statesmen, but by that unbidden and unconscious convergence of many thoughts and wills in successive generations to which, as it obeys no single guiding hand, we may give the name of "drifting".

I am afraid a mistake was made by Lord Macaulay and others in the direction they gave to educational efforts in India. Popular education would have enabled the millions to raise themselves a little out of their extreme poverty. The University education only manufactures a redundant supply of candidate for the liberal professions in a country where the demand is small, and as a by-product turns out a formidable array of seditious article-writers.

[Permitting discussions in the Indian Council seems to me] an unmeaning mimicry of the forms of popular institutions where the reality is impossible. What is called public opinion in India is frequently the opinion of a clique, and presents none of the guarantees for sound judgment possessed by a public opinion which represents the combined views of a large mass of different interests and classes. I have the smallest possible belief in 'Councils' possessing any other than consultative functions.

One thing at least is clear—that no one believes in our good intentions. We are often told to secure ourselves by their affections, not by force. Our great-grand children may be privileged to do it, but not we.

[T]he central doctrine of Conservatism, that it is better to endure almost any political evil than to risk a breach of the historic continuity of government.

The two parties represent two opposite moods of the English mind, which may be trusted, unless past experience is wholly useless, to succeed each other from time to time. Neither of them, neither the love of organic changes nor the dislike of it, can be described as normal to a nation. In every nation, they have succeeded each other at varying intervals during the whole of the period which separates its birth from its decay. Each finds in the circumstances and constitution of individuals a regular support which never deserts it. Among men, the old, the phlegmatic, the sober-minded, among classes, those who have more to lose than to gain by change, furnish the natural Conservatives. The young, the envious, the restless, the dreaming, those whose condition cannot easily be made worse, will be rerum novarum cupidi. But the two camps together will not nearly include the nation: for the vast mass of every nation is unpolitical.

On Tory principles the case presents much that is painful, but no perplexity whatever. Ireland must be kept, like India, at all hazards: by persuasion if possible; if not, by force.

The whole of our conduct towards the Yankees is too disgusting to think calmly of. ... If we had recognised the South ten years ago, America would have now been nicely divided into hostile states.

So far as positive religion goes, the Tests Act...has left Oxford better off than it was before. There is more security for religious teaching than there was. The great effect of the Tests Act—or rather of that great movement of public opinion of which the Tests Act was only the outcome—has been negative. All hindrance to the teaching of infidelity has been taken away, and that is the great danger of the future. (Hear, hear.) The great danger is that there should be found inside our Universities—especially, I fear, inside Oxford—a nucleus and focus of infidel teaching and influence—(hear, hear)—not infidel in any coarse or abusive sense, but in that sense which Professor Palmer used the words "heathen virtue." I fear that the danger we have to look to is that some Colleges in Oxford may in the future play a part similar to that disastrous part which the German Universities have played in the de-Christianization of the upper and middle classes.

I am afraid a belief is prevalent that the advancement of morality is due to the action of Government authority. If so, we are in danger of abandoning the highest standard of morality, that of Christianity, and of seeking another in Acts of Parliament and regulations of police. Is there any country in the world in which the action of the Legislature has been able to supply the calls of the moralist and the teacher? 150 years ago the upper and middle classes of this country were as bad with regard to drunkenness as the lower classes are now. People did not then trust to legislative action, they resorted to civilization and religion. They trusted to allegiance to a principle, and in the upper and middle classes of this country at present drunkenness is not a prevailing vice. Why, then, not believe that the influences which had been so powerful with the upper and middle classes will be equally operative with the lower? I trust that in any measures your Lordships may be asked to pass, you will shrink from attempting a task which it is impossible for any Legislature to perform—namely, by the action of Government to insure morality among the people.

I am sure that no more certain method, not only of dechristianizing, but demoralizing the youth of the classes who send their children to the Universities could be found than subjecting them to the influence of tutors who would start with the idea that all beliefs should be submitted for free selection to the consciences and intelligences of their pupils.

Some persons, I know, entertain a notion that the proper way to educate a young man of 18 is to put before him all the arguments and systems of belief which ever have been or can be devised, and let him take his choice; but I am quite convinced that no such notion will ever commend itself to the general mass of parents in this country. They are well aware that thorny questions of controversy are not fit for men of unripe and unpractised minds, and that the only effect of asking them to choose impartially between all beliefs is to make them think that no belief is of much importance, and that at an age when temptations are strongest they may come to the conclusion that the moral maxims which rest on belief and belief alone are mere ancient and valueless superstitions.

I wish that there was any chance of awakening England to the necessity or the duty of sustaining upon the Continent the position which she acquired and held in former times. Such a revival of feeling on her part would not only draw classes together in this country and purify our internal conflicts from the material element which is coming to be dominant in them; but it would prove an important guarantee for the maintenance of the present structure of Europe. ... [A]ny such revival of feeling in England is chimerical. ... The fault really lies in the change in the nature of spirit of the English nation. They do not wish, as they formerly did, for great national position, and they are glad to seclude themselves from European responsibilities by the protection which their insular position is supposed to give them. ... The great middle classes and the professional classes with whom power in this country really resides, have deliberately turned away from the ancient aims and policy of England in foreign affairs.

The conflict between Socialism and existing civilisation must be a death-struggle. If the combat is once commenced, one or other of the combatants must perish. It is idle to plead that the schemes of these men are their religion. There are religions so hostile to morality, so poisonous to the life-springs of society, that they are outside the pale of human tolerance.