The greatest of British interests is peace. - Henry Campbell-Bannerman

I should have thought that if there was one country in the world where property was more secure than another, it was this country, because it is at heart a justice-loving country and because it is a country in which men's hearts have neither been wholly spoilt by social wrong nor wholly hardened by wealth out of all responsiveness to social obligations. Therefore, it is a country with the will and capacity to move quickly and steadily forward along the path of social reform towards a fairer and more enlightened common life, free from the disgrace of the existence of unnecessary and unmerited misery and poverty.

Scotsmen...had played a not inglorious part in the work which they were destined to share of creating a common Empire and building up a united Britain... [T]he two countries [Scotland and England] had seen the growth of relations of mutual interest, mutual respect, and mutual understanding; and whoever tested the combination by its results in any field of thought or action or effort in learning, in literature, in statesmanship, in commerce, in the arts of peace or on the battlefield, must acknowledge that it had been a mighty combination, exercising a profound effect for good upon the world.

The proper way to lead the Boers into harmony with us and restore contentment and prosperity to the whole community was to leave them alone as far as possible—to leave them with their old form of government, with their own ways, with their own machinery of government—in order that the burgher, when he went about his daily life, should discern as little as possible the difference between that which happened to him as a British subject and that which happened to him when he was the subject of an independent State.