[Most legislation] will have the effect of surrounding the industry which it touches with precautions and investigations, inspections and regulations… - Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

It is right to be forward in the defence of the poor; no system that is not just as between rich and poor can hope to survive.

That Mahomedan civilisation hangs back from the general movement of the world, and certainly from the movement of Christian nations. It will not assimilate the modern ideas which are essential to progress and essential even to preservation, and therefore for many, many years past the solicitude of statesmanship has been how are they to keep these Mahomedan communities from crumbling into dust.

We must learn this rule, which is true alike of rich and poor — that no man and no class of men ever rise to any permanent improvement in their condition of body or of mind except by relying upon their own personal efforts. The wealth with which the rich man is surrounded is constantly tempting him to forget the truth, ad you see in family after family men degenerating from the position of their fathers because they live sluggishly and enjoy what has been placed before them without appealing to their own exertions. The poor man, especially in these days, may have a similar temptation offered to him by legislation, but this same inexorable rule will work. The only true lasting benefit which the statesman can give to the poor man is so to shape matters that the greatest possible opportunity for the exercise of his own moral and intellectual qualities shall be offered to him by the law; and therefore it is that in my opinion nothing that we can do this year, and nothing that we did before, will equal in the benefit that it will confer upon the physical condition, and with the physical will follow the moral too, of the labouring classes in the rural districts, that measure for free education which we passed last year. It will have the effect of bringing education home to many a family which hitherto has not been able to enjoy it, and in that way, by developing the faculties which nature has given to them, it will be a far surer and a far more valuable aid to extricate them from any of the sufferings or hardships to which they may be exposed than the most lavish gifts of mere sustenance that the State could offer.