Young Ireland, the Catholic Party and its newspaper organs in Dublin are trying to do all the mischief they can. They are praising the mutineers, and… - Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston

If those who voted against us had risen to power, what ought they have to have done as the logical and inevitable consequences of their vote? They asserted that our proceedings were unjustifiable. They were bound, therefore, in the event of their success, to have apologised to the Chinese barbarians for the wrongs we had done...they must have paid the rewards which had been given for the heads of our merchants, and the cost of the arsenic which had been used in poisoning our fellow-subjects at Hongkong. Gentlemen, I cannot envy the feelings of those men who could witness with calmness the heads of respectable British merchants on the walls of Canton, or the murders and assassinations and poisonings perpetrated on our fellow-countrymen abroad, and who, instead of feeling their blood boil with indignation at such proceedings, would have had us make an abject submission to the barbarians by whom these atrocities were committed.

I cannot help regretting that honourable gentlemen on the other side of this House should, in all the views which they announce on questions of foreign policy, seem always, by some fatality, to sympathize with arbitrary and despotic government. I cannot help regretting that they should view with averted and disdainful eye the efforts of every country which is endeavouring to establish freedom, and that they should condemn those so pointedly, who, by good offices or friendly co-operation, engage in the attempt to assist such nations in forming free establishments

The interests of civilization, the interests of commerce, and the interests of political independence, were all the interests of England, and all had been signally promoted by the emancipation of Greece.