You are told by the opponents of all change that such a reform as I contemplate would involve this country in ruin, would bring starvation to the hom… - Joseph Chamberlain

The goal towards which the advance will probably be made at an accelerated pace, is that in the direction of which the legislation of the last quarter of a century has been tending—the intervention, in other words, of the State on behalf of the weak against the strong, in the interests of labour against capital, of want and suffering against luxury and wealth.

I can conceive it is a possible theory that we might be even richer if we became simply a distributive Empire, a home for millionaires and for their dependents, with no productive industry whatever, no one who would come under our present description of working men, that is to say, a man who labours at some definitive trade or industry for himself. I can conceive that it might be possible that there should be even more cheques passing through the Clearing-house than there are now; that the returns of income-tax would be larger. A single millionaire might increase the returns from income-tax more than they would be diminished by the destruction of a whole industry of Birmingham. But, for reasons of difference in national character and position (hear, hear), you may be richer, but not greater. (Hear, hear). You may sink to a position which I do not like to contemplate, and yet all these official statistics might show you a constant tale of progress and increasing wealth.

The days are for great Empires and not for little States. The question for this generation is whether we are to be numbered among the great Empires or the little States.