“This despatch is the proof of my indictment against Mr. Gladstone, that he has used the resources, dishonored the name, and imperiled the position of this country in the East, on account of and in the interests of a gang of speculators and stock-jobbers who hold Egyptian bonds.”
“These speculators and stock-jobbers who have dragged this country into war, and have saddled this overburdened Empire of ours with the occupation of Egypt, are comparatively few in number, but are very powerful. They have their creatures in Government offices, they have their organs and writers in the London Press, they have their emissaries and agents hard at work in London society.”
“…for this government, whose cardinal principle of foreign policy was non-intervention; it has been left for them to intervene, and intervene actively and violently, and on the side of oppression as against the cause of freedom, in the one particular sphere in which till now non-intervention had been acquiesced in by both parties in the State.”
“…Mr. Gladstone intervened and shattered the revolutionary movement…from that disastrous day till now he has wandered amid the ruins, purposeless and bewildered, has made no effort to reconstruct Egyptian society, no effort to relieve from their burdens the Egyptian people; but that, haunted and distracted by the guiltiness of his intervention, he had added misery to misery, and woe to woe, till he has transformed the fair land of Egypt into a perfect hell upon earth. The people of England would say that such a state of things must cease; that a Government must be established which must possess the confidence of the Egyptian people; that a dynasty which is repudiated by a nation of six millions shall not be forced upon that nation by the armies and the navies of the liberty-loving and liberty-spreading Anglo-Saxon race…”
(Note: I guess I was right about the problem with Gladstone’s system…but to this fellow diminute of the Anglo-Saxon race, I would respond that he has substituted the Anglo-Saxon race for the Roman but has done exactly as Gladstone said: proposed liberty for one group in their domination of all others. So too, though, has Gladstone, that of the owed over the ower—internationally, anyway, debtor’s prison having been abolished in Britain a decade before…so the Anglo-Saxon is too rare and pure to go to jail for his drunken debt, but we will kill and starve the Egyptian for that of his country. Rank!)
“Great and endless controversies have been carried on for some years between rival Chancellors of the Exchequer, as to whether Liberals are more extravagant than Conservatives, or vice versa. Do not trouble yourselves about these quarrels—they are perfectly idle, fruitless, and beside the real question; figures and statistics are jumbled up, added to, subtracted from, multiplied, and divided by the frantic combatants, until a perfectly insoluble Chinese puzzle has been created, in which every one is hopelessly lost. The truth is—and I speak with the advantages of a looker-on, who, as you know, generally sees most of the game—that both parties are extravagant…year by year the control of the House of Commons over the expenditure is getting more slender and more feeble…
For many years there has been no overhauling by Parliament of the spending departments. It is a great mistake to suppose that Ministers preside over their departments. They do nothing of the kind. They merely appear for them in Parliament…this kind of regime has grown up on account of the House of Commons of late years being entirely given over to legislation. No time is ever left for what I call business, and year after year public accounts are left to look after themselves. Now, in all seriousness, this is an ominous change…I should like to see every one of our public departments rigorously inquired into by small committees of about seven experienced and practical members of Parliament, each. Depend upon it, we should discover some arrangements of extraordinary interest and curiosity.”
“The Radicals are always denouncing financial extravagance. They profess on this point great independence of party, but just test the sincerity of their denunciations by some such proposals as I have made to you…You would have such a howl of fury from them as never was heard. Rather than lose their chance of subverting the Constitution of this country, they would allow you to spend 200 millions a year.”
“Do you think the House of Commons would be wasting its time if it looked into all these matters carefully? Suppose a merchant were to find his expenditure greatly increased, his revenue greatly diminished, and his resources greatly failing, and under these circumstances were to occupy the whole of his time with the differential calculus, or with inquiries into interplanetary space. You would think him very foolish, not to say mad, and you would anticipate his speedy ruin. Well, the English people will be exactly like that merchant if at such a moment as the present they occupy the whole of their time with wild schemes of legislation, and leave the real, hard, practical business of life to take care of itself.”
“‘Vanity of vanities,’ says the preacher, ‘all is vanity.’ ‘Humbug of humbugs,’ says the Radical, ‘all is humbug.’ Gentlemen, we live in an age of advertisement, the age of Holloway’s pills, of Colman’s mustard, and of Horniman’s pure tea; and the policy of lavish advertisement has been so successful in commerce that the Liberal party, with its usual enterprise, has adapted it to politics.”
“For the purposes of recreation he has selected the felling of trees, and we may usefully remark that his amusements, like his politics, are essentially destructive. Every afternoon the whole world is invited to assist at the crashing fall of some beech or elm or oak. The forest laments in order that Mr. Gladstone may perspire, and full accounts of these proceedings are forwarded by special correspondents to every daily paper every recurring morning.”
“…to the illusory programme spread before you for the coming year, to the immense dangers and difficulties which surround you on every side—turn over all these matters in your minds, search your memories, look at them as you will; I ask you again, is there in any quarter of the globe, where the influence of Mr. Gladstone’s Government has been felt, is there one single item, act, expression, or development on which you can dwell with any pride, or even satisfaction?…To all those who leaned upon Mr. Gladstone, who trusted in him, and who hoped for something from him, chips, nothing but chips; to those who defied him, trampled upon his power, insulted and reviled his representatives and his policy, to the barbarous Boer and the rebel Irish, to them, and to them alone, booty and great gain.”
“Surely a world of serious reflection is opened up; surely the art of government must have sunk to a very low ebb when the first servant of the Crown has to be watched night and day by alguazils armed to the teeth…But I ask myself, are we to blame humanity for this state of things? Is our civilization all in vain? Is Christianity but a phantom and a fiction? Is human nature the awful and incurable cause? Surely not. It is more natural to blame the statesmen who, to possess themselves of power, to overthrow a hated rival, set class against class and race against race; who use their eloquence for no nobler purpose than to lash into frenzy the needy and the discontented, who for party purposes are ready to deride morality and paralyse law; who, to gain a few votes either in Parliament or in a borough, ally themselves equally with the atheist or with the rebel, and who lightly arouse and lightly spring from one delirium of multitude to another in order to maintain themselves at a giddy and a perilous height. This is the true explanation, the deep-seated reason of the words ‘guarded as usual.’ Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues, to destroy Lord Beaconsfield, did not scruple to appeal to the most desperate instincts of the human race; and now, to control and crush down this legion of foul friends, the resources of civilization are almost exhausted.”
“…a heterogeneous agglomeration of Whigs and Radicals, in which ‘pull devil, pill baker,’ is the order of the day…For the Whigs are a class with all the selfish prejudices and all the vices of a class; the Radicals are a sect with all the grinding tyranny and all the debasing fanaticism of a sect. The Whig class and the Radical sect have succeeded, by an amount of political cunning rarely equalled in the history of States, in acquiring a power which their monstrous union is impotent to wield; but their unnatural connection cannot last…The Whigs tell you that the institutions of this kingdom, as illustrated by the balance of Queen, Lords and Commons, and the Established Church, are but conveniences and useful commodities, which may be safely altered, modified, or even abolished, so long as the alteration, modification, or abolition is left to the Whigs to carry out. The Radicals tell you that these institutions are hideous, poisonous, and degrading, and that the divine caucus is the only machine which can turn out, as if it were a patent medicine, the happiness of humanity.”
“And this party—this Tory party of to-day—exists by the favour of no caucus, nor for the selfish interests of any class. Its motto is—of the people, for the people, by the people; unity and freedom are the beacons which shed their light around its future path, and amid all political conflict this shall be its only aim—to increase and to secure within imperishable walls the historic happiness of English homes.”
(Note #2: It’s fascinating that both Gladstone & this Churchill were trying to cover themselves in Lincoln…)