As to action the matter is simple: India is held by the sword: and its rulers must in all essentials be guided by the maxims which benefit the Govern… - Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

A party whose mission is to live entirely upon the discovery of grievances are apt to manufacture the element upon which they subsist.

You must ask yourselves, supposing 150 years ago a school had arisen similar to schools that we have heard now, who had told and who had persuaded the English Government that such things as the conquest of India, or of Canada, or Gibraltar, or Malta, or the Cape of Good Hope—that these things were unimportant, and that the one thing was to look at home at our own parochial politics? Supposing this had been said 150 years ago, do you imagine you would now be the great, the numerous, the prosperous nation that you are?

Now if Conservative has any meaning at all, it means anti-Radical. The Radicals are the only inheritors of the revolutionary views which the Conservative party was set up to counteract; and the two can no more act together, if both are honest, than a weasel can act with a rat. Hostility to Radicalism, incessant, implacable hostility, is the essential definition of Conservatism. The fear that the Radicals may triumph is the only final cause that the Conservative party can plead for their own existence.