You closed your speech with some eloquent expressions of your desire to satisfy the national aspirations of Ireland. Rightly or wrongly, I have not t… - 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.

We live in an age of a war of tariffs. ... [I]n this great battle Great Britain has deliberately stripped herself of the armour and the weapons by which the battle has to be fought. ... The weapon with which they all fight is admission to their own markets. ... I would impress upon you that if you intend, in this conflict of commercial treaties, to hold your own, you must be prepared, if need be, to inflict upon the nations which injure you the penalty which is in your hands, that of refusing them access to your markets. (Loud and prolonged cheers and a voice, "Common sense at last.") There is a reproach in that interruption, but I have never said anything else.

The whole of our conduct towards the Yankees is too disgusting to think calmly of. ... If we had recognised the South ten years ago, America would have now been nicely divided into hostile states.