I am myself of that somewhat flabby nature that always prefers agreement to disagreement...When the Labour Party sit on these benches, we shall all w… - Stanley Baldwin

I saw the King on Monday, 16th November, and I began by giving him my view of a possible marriage. I told him that I did not think that a particular marriage was one that would receive the approbation of the country. That marriage would have involved the lady becoming Queen. I did tell His Majesty once that I might be a remnant of the old Victorians, but that my worst enemy would not say of me that I did not know what the reaction of the English people would be to any particular course of action, and I told him that so far as they went I was certain that that would be impracticable.

There is a saying as old as the Greeks that it is more important to form good habits than to frame good laws. There is an undercurrent of suspicion that this is true and that, like patriotism, legislation is not enough. The hopes held out when laws are framed are not always realised when laws are passed...What happens to all the laws placed on the statute book? If half the hopes of their promoters had been realised, would not the millennium have arrived ere this?

There is no more romantic episode in English history, or in the haphazard building of the Empire, than the story of the "Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay." To look for the North-west passage while they made profits out of furs, to obtain a charter of sovereignty over the lands which contained all the waters flowing into that bay, and yet to leave those lands unexplored for many, many years—this is a typically British proceeding. They sought the western equivalents of "ivory and apes and peacocks," and they found an empire as a by-product. They created a great tradition, a tradition which is your own to-day, of discipline and endurance round a commercial ideal. They treated the Indians as a source of profit, yet they treated them with justice and with kindliness. They kept one eye on dividends and another on exploration. What race besides our own could be so casual, so far-sighted, so inconsistent and so successful?