No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is whole… - Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

I never admired the political transformation scenes of 1829, 1846, 1867; and I certainly do not wish to be the chief agent in adding a fourth to the history of the Tory party.

I earnestly urge that, in pressing our right over those countries, we are not actuated by any merely ambitious view of extending the boundaries of the British Empire, or the grandeur of the claims which that Empire can put forward. There is a much more solid reason: to keep our trade, our industries alive we must open new sources of consumption in the more untrodden portions of the earth, and we are the only nation that can occupy those countries without shutting them to all the world besides. If we occupy a distant, large, and uncivilised country and attempt to make it subservient to the purposes of commerce, we injure no others, because all others are as free to use it for commercial purposes as ourselves. But there are other countries which, if they occupy any of these regions, entirely shut it out from British commerce, as though the access to it was physically impossible. In the interests of our industry and our trade...I earnestly hope we shall do all we can to maintain, push forward, and strengthen our power in these rich and extensive regions, and that we shall not by any weakness, or feebleness, or undue economy now forfeit the brilliant hopes which a stronger policy might give us in the future.

But an Ethiopian cannot change his skin—nor can I put off my "Toryism"—my deep distrust of the changes which are succeeding each other so rapidly. Numbers of men support them who are not of the spirit that bred them; but that spirit is essentially a pagan spirit, discarding the supernatural, and worshipping not God but man. It is creeping over Europe rapidly: and I can not put off the conviction that it is dissolving every cement that holds society together. I have given you enough and too much of my gloomy thoughts. They have been excited by reading in a Liberal paper "that learning is too high and sacred a thing to be sectarian". Bah!