[I]f we arrived at that situation [when]...the one country was fully prepared for aggression, and the other wholly unprepared for events, the result … - Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston

What business is it of ours to ask whether the French nation thinks proper to be governed by a king, an emperor, a president, or a consul? Our object and our duty is to cement the closest ties of friendship between ourselves and our nearest neighbour... There is nothing, I am convinced, in the real interests of England and France which can stand in the way of the most cordial friendship between the two nations.

Sir, I believe that if the House adopts this Motion...[t]hey will say, "Here is a Power that has been formerly great in arms, whose armies have gained victories in remote regions, whose fleets have floated triumphantly over every ocean... this people are now overcome by the love of gain. They fear the expenses and the efforts which may be necessary to protect their countrymen, and they abandon a large community of British subjects at the extreme end of the globe to a set of barbarians—a set of kidnapping, murdering, poisoning barbarians." I say foreign nations would feel that England has descended from that high station which hitherto she has occupied, at the beck of some of the basest, the meanest, and the most degraded beings in the civilized world.

The King of Prussia seems to have made his models of action Charles the first of England and Charles the Tenth of France and Bismarck is an humble Imitator of the Ministers of those Two unfortunate Sovereigns. I hope the King's fate will not be like theirs. The King...is quite wrong in attempting unconstitutionally to force his opinions upon his Parliament. He ought to give way and he will be compelled to give way.