On general grounds I object to Parliament trying to regulate private morality in matters which only affects the person who commits the offence. - Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

And above and beyond the mere commercial gain, there rose under Mr. Gladstone's magic wand the vista of an age of security and peace—disbanded armaments, forgotten jealousies, immunity not only from the scourge but from the panic of war; pleasant dreams, constantly belied by experience, constantly renewed by theorists, but too closely linked to the hopes of all who believe either in material progress or in the promises of religion ever to be abandoned as chimera.

The fact was, that articles of prime necessity, such as tea and sugar, were adulterated to such an extent as materially to affect the health of an enormous portion of the population, and, the poor man being unable to protect himself, he contended that it was the duty of this House to step in and protect him.

[Y]ou must remember that these people, these Turks, are of the race of Genghiz and Tamerlane, that they belong to a religion, of which I would not say a word of disrespect, which has produced high civilisation and morality, but is capable of the most atrocious perversion and corruption of any religion on the face of the globe; and being Mahomedans and being Turks, with their fanaticism thoroughly aroused, they perpetrated these horrors at which Christendom has grown pale.