I think there is a gentlemanlike policy which nations as well as individuals would do well to adopt. - Robert Peel

Each town and each country will command the amount of currency which it requires for its own purposes, undisturbed in the slightest degree by consulting its manifest interest, namely, by purchasing that which it wants in the cheapest market. [Derisive cheers.] Yes, by purchasing that which it wants in the cheapest market. You consider this a very low and unworthy principle; that it is a doctrine of the Manchester school; that it is a novel doctrine of some speculative political philosophers, and that it may be safely rejected. But this doctrine of purchasing in the cheapest market is not a doctrine of speculative philosophers only. It is not a doctrine introduced by modern economists. It is, no doubt, a doctrine sanctioned expressly and directly by the authority of Adam Smith. It is the doctrine of Say and of Hume. It is opposed to a doctrine which was fashioned some eighty or ninety years since, of which such writers as Montesquieu and Voltaire were the patrons; but Smith, and Say, and Hume, demonstrated the true principles which ought to regulate the commercial policy of a nation.

I gladly avail myself also of this, a legitimate opportunity, of making a more public appeal—of addressing myself, through you, to that great and intelligent class of society of which you are a portion, and a fair and unexceptionable representative—to that class which is much less interested in the contentions of party, than in the maintenance of order and the cause of good government

Do not you think that the tone of England—of that great compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs, which is called public opinion—is more liberal—to use an odious but intelligible phrase—than the policy of the Government? Do not you think that there is a feeling, becoming daily more general and more confirmed—that is, independent of the pressure of taxation, or any immediate cause—in favour of some undefined change in the mode of governing the country?