Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

"Representative Government answers admirably so long as all those who are represented desire much the same thing, and have interests tolerably analogous; but it is put to an intolerable strain when it rests upon a community divided into two sections, one of which is bitterly hostile to the other, and desirous of opposing it upon all occasions. We do not know how the Mahommedan and Hindoo populations if placed face to face with each other in elective representative Government would view each other; but we know, at all events, that one of the heaviest responsibilities and severest duties of the Government of India is to prevent the outbreak of hostilities caused by the profound differences between those two communities—differences in race, traditions, history, and creed."

"You closed your speech with some eloquent expressions of your desire to satisfy the national aspirations of Ireland. Rightly or wrongly, I have not the slightest wish to satisfy the national aspirations of Ireland and I remained silent because if I had spoken I must have spoken to that extent against you."

"I take Socialism in its strict meaning to be for the State to do that which is usually done by private people for the sake of gain. I believe that that is sometimes a very unwise thing; on the other hand, it is sometimes a very wise thing. There is nothing so Socialistic as the Mint or the Post Office. No doubt my noble Friend is right in saying that at the present day there is a strong leaning towards bringing in the interference of the State on every possible occasion, and I think that is a tendency against which it is right that we should be upon our guard. It is not that we sin against any principle, but that we expect from the State what it cannot possibly do if we impose upon it tasks which it cannot fitly perform or burdens beyond its power; all we shall do will be to create an indefinite source of expense, and ultimately an unlimited cause of corruption and inefficiency."

"The conflict which we have to fight is still a conflict of tariffs. In every country resolutions are being formed and plans are being worked out for limiting still further the intercourse of nations with each other and interposing new barriers of tariff. ... And as years go on we shall have to fight that battle. ... It is the world's conflict of the future."

"Parliament is a potent engine, and its enactments must always do something, but they very seldom do what the originators of these enactments meant."

"[Most legislation] will have the effect of surrounding the industry which it touches with precautions and investigations, inspections and regulations, in which it will be slowly enveloped and stifled."

"That Mahomedan civilisation hangs back from the general movement of the world, and certainly from the movement of Christian nations. It will not assimilate the modern ideas which are essential to progress and essential even to preservation, and therefore for many, many years past the solicitude of statesmanship has been how are they to keep these Mahomedan communities from crumbling into dust."

"Our object is to multiply proprietors of land in a country [Ireland] which, owing to a great variety of causes, has come into a thoroughly unhealthy condition, and which, without the support of a class in the highest sense Conservative, of a class which has a deep and ineradicable interest in the existing state of things, cannot come back to the healthy condition in which we all desire to see it. ... I should have thought it was now one of the commonplaces of politics that where such a class exists it is a sheet-anchor of the social stability of the country."

"There is no danger which we have to contend with which is so serious as an exaggeration of the power, the useful power, of the interference of the State. It is not that the State may not or ought not to interfere when it can do so with advantage, but that the occasions on which it can so interfere are so lamentably few and the difficulties that lie in its way are so great. But I think that some of us are in danger of an opposite error. What we have to struggle against is the unnecessary interference of the State, and still more when that interference involves any injustice to any people, especially to any minority. All those who defend freedom are bound as their first duty to be the champions of minorities, and the danger of allowing the majority, which holds the power of the State, to interfere at its will is that the interests of the minority will be disregarded and crushed out under the omnipotent force of a popular vote. But that fear ought not to lead us to carry our doctrine further than is just. I have heard it stated — and I confess with some surprise — as an article of Conservative opinion that paternal Government — that is to say, the use of the machinery of Government for the benefit of the people — is a thing in itself detestable and wicked. I am unable to subscribe to that doctrine, either politically or historically. I do not believe it to have been a doctrine of the Conservative party at any time. On the contrary, if you look back, even to the earlier years of the present century, you will find the opposite state of things; you will find the Conservative party struggling to confer benefits — perhaps ignorantly and unwisely, but still sincerely — through the instrumentality of the State, and resisted by a severe doctrinaire resistance from the professors of Liberal opinions. When I am told that it is an essential part of Conservative opinion to resist any such benevolent action on the part of the State, I should expect Bentham to turn in his grave; it was he who first taught the doctrine that the State should never interfere, and any one less like a Conservative than Bentham it would be impossible to conceive... The Conservative party has always leaned — perhaps unduly leaned — to the use of the State, as far as it can properly be used, for the improvement of the physical, moral, and intellectual condition of our people, and I hope that that mission the Conservative party will never renounce, or allow any extravagance on the other side to frighten them from their just assertion of what has always been its true and inherent principles."

"[T]he trade of Africa...is a motive for preventing territory from falling into the hands of other Powers, that those Powers will probably use the dominion which we concede to them for the purpose of crippling the trade that we otherwise should possess; and that seems to be a legitimate motive for the accession of territory which might otherwise be wanting."

"We must learn this rule, which is true alike of rich and poor — that no man and no class of men ever rise to any permanent improvement in their condition of body or of mind except by relying upon their own personal efforts. The wealth with which the rich man is surrounded is constantly tempting him to forget the truth, ad you see in family after family men degenerating from the position of their fathers because they live sluggishly and enjoy what has been placed before them without appealing to their own exertions. The poor man, especially in these days, may have a similar temptation offered to him by legislation, but this same inexorable rule will work. The only true lasting benefit which the statesman can give to the poor man is so to shape matters that the greatest possible opportunity for the exercise of his own moral and intellectual qualities shall be offered to him by the law; and therefore it is that in my opinion nothing that we can do this year, and nothing that we did before, will equal in the benefit that it will confer upon the physical condition, and with the physical will follow the moral too, of the labouring classes in the rural districts, that measure for free education which we passed last year. It will have the effect of bringing education home to many a family which hitherto has not been able to enjoy it, and in that way, by developing the faculties which nature has given to them, it will be a far surer and a far more valuable aid to extricate them from any of the sufferings or hardships to which they may be exposed than the most lavish gifts of mere sustenance that the State could offer."

"I am very anxious to multiply small holdings and small properties in this country. ... I do not think that small holdings are the most economical way of cultivating the land. But there are things of more importance than economy. I believe that a small proprietary constitutes the strongest bulwark against revolutionary change, and affords the soundest support for the Conservative feeling and institutions of the country."

"England is the Protestant nation of the world. (Cheers.) England has resisted more than any other country the domination of the clerical profession...and has resisted the secular domination of the clerical profession. You are going to create an ultra-clerical state under the government of Archbishops Croke and Walsh. (Hear, hear.) You are going to give the power of the majority of the state, and therefore the power of the state, to those who through long ages have always been the enemies of English influence and English power."

"We live in an age of a war of tariffs. ... [I]n this great battle Great Britain has deliberately stripped herself of the armour and the weapons by which the battle has to be fought. ... The weapon with which they all fight is admission to their own markets. ... I would impress upon you that if you intend, in this conflict of commercial treaties, to hold your own, you must be prepared, if need be, to inflict upon the nations which injure you the penalty which is in your hands, that of refusing them access to your markets. (Loud and prolonged cheers and a voice, "Common sense at last.") There is a reproach in that interruption, but I have never said anything else."

"I think there are...parts of the Poor Law which are more severe than it is necessary they should be, and that they may with advantage be modified. It would be a tremendous evil if by maintaining provisions of undue severity we were to disgust our people with a system which undoubtedly has contributed to the security and prosperity we have hitherto enjoyed. There can be no doubt that some of the dangers which in 1834 were menacing and real have ceased to have the same character at present. In 1834 you had the terrible fact to deal with that the masses of the population felt it no disgrace to receive the aid of the Poor Law; rather they thought it the natural end and condition of their being. An enormous change has taken place in the opinions of the working classes on that point. Their sense of self-respect and their dislike to receiving parochial relief have greatly increased, and thus the dangers of an abusive use of Poor Law relief have in that proportion diminished."

"You do not imagine that the adversary of centuries can be converted by the honeyed words of two or three months into a fast, benevolent, and trusty friend. ... That section of Irishmen, of the inhabitants of Ireland who are commanded by Archbishop Walsh and Mr. Healy (hisses), represent the enemy which England has contended for centuries. They represent the enemy against whom England appealed to settlers from Great Britain to come here and help her in her almost impossible task; they are the people who resisted you and threatened you and threatened the English interest again and again in 1641, in 1690, in 1798."

"[A]s long as England is true to herself now or on any future occasion, if you allow this atrocious, this mean, this treacherous revolution to pass, you will be untrue to the duty which has descended to you from a splendid ancestry, you will be untrue to your highest traditions, you will be untrue to the trust that has been bequeathed to you from the past, you will be untrue to the Empire of England."

"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."

"[W]e may fairly protest against any artificial action which tends to lower wages, and therefore makes a living wage more difficult to obtain. This free immigration of destitute aliens is to my mind an interference of that kind. We have a right to say that our social system is for ourselves and that we will not receive a destitute population which will lower the standard of our own population and increase the burdens we have to bear."

"[A]ll these successive triumphs of research, Dalton’s, Kirchhoff’s, Mendeléeff’s, greatly as they have added to our store of knowledge, have gone but little way to solve the problem which the elementary atoms have for centuries presented to mankind. What the atom of each element is, whether it is a movement, or a thing, or a vortex, or a point having inertia, whether there is any limit to its divisibility, and, if so, how that limit is imposed, whether the long list of elements is final, or whether any of them have any common origin, all these questions remain surrounded by a darkness as profound as ever. The dream which lured the alchemists to their tedious labours, and which may be said to have called chemistry into being, has assuredly not been realised, but it has not yet been refuted. The boundary of our knowledge in this direction remains where it was many centuries ago. The next discussion... to find unsolved riddles which have hitherto defined the scrutiny of science, would be the question of... the ether. The ether occupies a highly anomalous position in the world of science. It may be described as a half-discovered entity. I dare not use any less pedantic word than entity to designate it, for it would be a great exaggeration of our knowledge if I were to speak of it as a body or even as a substance. When nearly a century ago Young and Fresnel discovered that the motions of an incandescent particle were conveyed to our eyes by undulation, it followed that between our eyes and the particle there must be something to undulate. In order to furnish that something, the notion of the ether was conceived, and for more than two generations the main, if not the only, function of the word ether has been to furnish a nominative case to the verb 'to undulate.' Lately, our conception of this entity has received a notable extension. One of the most brilliant of the services which Professor Maxwell has rendered to science has been the discovery that the figure which expressed the velocity of light also expressed the multiplier required to change the measure of static or passive electricity into that of dynamic or active electricity. The interpretation... is that, as light and the electric impulse move approximately at the same rate through space, it is probable that the undulations which convey them are undulations of the same medium. And as induced electricity penetrates through everything, or nearly everything, it follows that the ether through which its undulations are propagated must pervade all , whether empty or full, whether occupied by opaque matter or transparent matter, or by no matter at all. The attractive experiments by which the late Professor Herz illustrated the electric vibrations of the ether will only be alluded to by me... But the mystery of the ether... remains even more inscrutable than before. Of this all-pervading entity we know absolutely nothing except that it can be made to undulate. ...And even its solitary function of undulating, ether performs in an abnormal fashion which has caused infinite perplexity. All s that we know transmit any blow they have received by waves which undulate backwards and forwards in the path of their own advance. The ether undulates athwart the path of the wave’s advance. The genius of Lord Kelvin has recently discovered... a labile state of equilibrium, in which a fluid that is infinite in its extent may exist, and may undulate in this eccentric fashion without outraging the laws of mathematics. ...[I]t leaves our knowledge of the ether in a very rudimentary condition. It has no known qualities except one, and that quality is in the highest degree anomalous and inscrutable. ...It is not easy to fit in the theory of electrical ether waves with the phenomena of positive and negative electricity, and as to the true significance and cause of those counteracting and complementary forces, to which we give the provisional names of negative and positive, we know about as much now as Franklin knew a century and a half ago."

"Few men, whatever their creed, would now seek their geology in the books of their religion, or, on the other hand, would fancy that the laboratory or the microscope could help them to penetrate the mysteries which hang over the nature and the destiny of the soul of man. ... We live in a small, bright oasis of knowledge, surrounded on all sides by a vast, unexplored region of impenetrable mystery."

"It is the place where Collectivist and Socialistic experiments are tried. It is the place where a new revolutionary spirit finds its instruments and collects its arms."

"[I]n dealing with such money as you possess, I have no doubt that here in Brighton you will not differ from me that the first claim is the naval defence of England. (Loud and continued cheers.) ... It is our business to be quite sure in respect to this island-home of ours, whose inaccessibility is the source of our greatness, that no improvement of foreign fleets and no combination of foreign alliances should be able for a moment to threaten its safety."

"I grieve that so much of the resources of this country must be spent on what is essentially an unprofitable expenditure ... but, after all, safety, safety from a foreign foe comes first, before every other earthly blessing, and we must take care, in our responsibility to the many interests that depend upon us, in our responsibility to the generations that are to succeed to us, that no neglect of ours shall suffer that safety to be compromised."

"Now consider the case of the Uitlanders. They are not a minority. They are a majority, but those who differ from them in traditions and race and feeling have the government and have the rifles (cheers), and the result is that the Uitlanders get no votes and bitterly complain that they get no justice. (Cheers.) I have not investigated their grievances; I do not know whether they are correct; but I know it tells what would have been the complaint and sorrow of our Ulster people if we had handed them over to the tender mercies of Home Rule."

"[Y]ou must remember that these people, these Turks, are of the race of Genghiz and Tamerlane, that they belong to a religion, of which I would not say a word of disrespect, which has produced high civilisation and morality, but is capable of the most atrocious perversion and corruption of any religion on the face of the globe; and being Mahomedans and being Turks, with their fanaticism thoroughly aroused, they perpetrated these horrors at which Christendom has grown pale."

"I say that we put all our money upon the wrong horse. ... My own conviction is strong that, unless some very essential reforms in the conduct of the government are adopted, the doom of the Turkish Empire cannot be very long postponed."

"I feel it is our duty to sustain the federated action of Europe. I think it has suffered by the somewhat absurd name which has been given to it—the Concert of Europe—and the intense importance of the fact has been buried under the bad jokes to which the word has given rise. But the federated action of Europe—if we can maintain it, if we can maintain this Legislature—is our sole hope of escaping from the constant terror and the calamity of war, the constant pressure of the burdens of an armed peace which weigh down the spirits and darken the prospects of every nation in this part of the world. ["Hear, hear!"] The federation of Europe is the only hope we have; but that federation is only to be maintained by observing the conditions on which every Legislature must depend, on which every judicial system must be based—the engagements into which it enters must be respected."

"You must remember what the concert of Europe is. The concert, or, as I prefer to call it, the inchoate federation of Europe, is a body which acts only when it is unanimous...remember this—that this federation of Europe is the embryo of the only possible structure of Europe which can save civilization from the desolating effects of a disastrous war. (Cheers.) You notice that on all sides the instruments of destruction, the piling up of arms, are becoming larger and larger. The powers of concentration are becoming greater, the instruments of death more active and more numerous, and are improved with every year; and each nation is bound, for its own safety's sake, to take part in this competition. These are the things which are done, so to speak, on the side of war. The one hope that we have to prevent this competition from ending in a terrible effort of mutual destruction which will be fatal to Christian civilization—the one hope we have is that the Powers may gradually be brought together, to act together in a friendly spirit on all questions of difference which may arise, until at last they shall be welded in some international constitution which shall give to the world, as a result of their great strength, a long spell of unfettered and prosperous trade and continued peace."

"I have a strong belief that there is a danger of the public opinion of this country undergoing a reaction from the Cobdenic doctrines of 30 or 40 years ago, and believing that it is our duty to take everything we can, to fight everybody, and to make a quarrel of every dispute. That seems to me a very dangerous doctrine, not merely because it might incite other nations against us—though that is not a consideration to be neglected, for the kind of reputation we are at present enjoying on the Continent of Europe is by no means pleasant, and by no means advantageous; but there is a much more serious danger, and that is lest we should overtax our strength. However strong you may be, whether you are a man or a nation, there is a point beyond which your strength will not go. It is madness; it ends in ruin if you allow yourselves to pass beyond it."

"You may roughly divide the nations of the world as the living and the dying. On the one side you have great countries of enormous power growing in power every year, growing in wealth, growing in dominion, growing in the perfection of their organization. Railways have given to them the power to concentrate upon any one point the whole military force of their population and to assemble armies of a magnitude and power never dreamt of in the generations that have gone by. Science has placed in the hands of those armies weapons ever growing in their efficacy of destruction, and, therefore, adding to the power—fearfully to the power—of those who have the opportunity of using them. ... [T]he weak States are becoming weaker and the strong States are becoming stronger. It needs no specialty of prophecy to point out to you what the inevitable result of that combined process must be. ... [T]he living nations will gradually encroach on the territory of the dying, and the seeds and causes of conflict amongst civilized nations will speedily appear."

"It was stated as clearly as possible in that protocol, and was evidently the object of the action of the two Powers at the time, that an era of friendly co-operation should be introduced, in which both races should have, under the conduct of both Governments, the utmost equality it was possible to confer on them. That was the guiding principle of the Government in 1881. I do not affect to sympathise with the view they took. ... I did not support it at the time; on the contrary, I resisted it to the utmost of my power. I thought it was a policy tainted with the fault, which is a virtue in many men's eyes, but in my eyes is almost the most dangerous fault a policy can have—it was an optimistic policy. It was an undue belief in the effect of amiable acts not supported by requisite strength."

"He entirely shares your Majesty's burning indignation at the gross and monstrous injustice which has been perpetrated in France. It is perfectly horrible; and gives the impression that truth and justice are no longer regarded as of any serious importance in France. It is difficult to understand how any country can conduct either civil or military Government in such a deplorable condition of the public mind."

"I have said for years that I always thought that when I knew what the Queen thought I knew pretty certainly what view her subjects would take, and especially the middle classes of her subjects."

"It is true that there had been spread about in the world the impression that we should never fight again, and that every adversary had only to press hardly and boldly upon us to be certain that we should yield. It was a gross miscalculation on their part. (Cheers.) I have no doubt that the converse is true, and now that we have shown what powers we can exercise, what qualities we can display, how really we can copy the brilliant example of those who have gone before us, that the power of England is not only illustrated by the example, but that it is safe—that the cause of peace is now more secure than it was before the strength of England was conclusively shown. (Cheers.)"

"England is, I believe, the only country in which during a great war eminent men write and speak publicly as if they belonged to the enemy."

"It is very sad, but I'm afraid America is bound to forge ahead and nothing can restore the equality between us. If we had interfered in the Confederate War it was then possible for us to reduce the power of the United States to manageable proportions. But two such chances are not given to a nation in the course of its career."

"Solitude shows us what should be; society shows us what we are."

"It is one of the misfortunes of our political system that parties are formed more with reference to controversies that are gone by than to the controversies which these parties have actually to decide."

"The most formidable intellectual figure that the Conservative party has ever produced."

"[I]n 1890 I exhibited An Eviction in Ireland, which Lord Salisbury was pleased to be facetious about in his speech at the banquet, remarking on the "breezy beauty" of the landscape, which almost made him wish he could take part in an eviction himself. How like a Cecil!"

"He refused to believe in the possibility of a Southern defeat. Even in [18]65 when...an instinct similar to his own, dominant in Lee and in his heroic band of followers, was alone prolonging the conflict, he would not give up hope of their ultimate victory. Thus at each successive stage the bitterness of disillusion was added to that of defeat. There were moments when the nervous strain upon him became so great as to seriously alarm his wife for his health, if not for his reason. He took to walking in his sleep, and she used to recall her alarm when, on waking one night, she saw him standing at the wide open window of a second-floor bedroom, fast asleep, but in a state of strong excitement and preparing to resist forcibly some dreamt-of intrusion of enemies—presumably Federal soldiers or revolutionary mob leaders. She recorded that never in her knowledge of him did he suffer from such extremes of depression and nervous misery as at that time."

"Salisbury took over the Foreign Secretaryship himself in December 1886... The rise in Britain's position internationally was soon evident. Salisbury presided over an increase in her dominion over Africa generally, at the same time reducing the friction between Britain and both Germany and France. By the end of this Conservative term of office, in August 1892, Britain's international position was higher than it had ever been before."

"Whatever may have been lost at the time has been gained by posterity, for Lord Salisbury's letters have a character and interest apart from and even superior to the important matters with which they deal. A wit at once shrewd and genial; an insight into human nature penetrating, comprehensive, rather cynical; a vast knowledge of affairs; the quick thoughts of a moody, fertile mind, expressed in language that always preserves a spice and flavour of its own, are qualities which must exert an attraction upon a generation to whom the politics of the '85 Government will be dust."

"There was a tremendous air about this wise old Statesman. Lord Salisbury, for all his resistance to modern ideas, and perhaps in some way because of it, played a greater part in gathering together the growing strength of the British Empire for a time of trial which few could foresee and none could measure, than any other historic figure that can be cited."

"Salisbury's caustic, far-ranging common sense supplemented Disraeli's darting vision."

"The giant of conservative doctrine is Salisbury, with Churchill, Eliot, Disraeli, Waugh and Burke in the 1790s best thought of as trailing in his wake."

"[H]e was one of the most fascinating, and in his later days one of the most impressive, speakers to whom it was possible to listen. Whether in the House of Lords, or at a Lord Mayor's banquet, or at a public meeting, he appeared to suggest embodied wisdom; he was the philosopher meditating aloud. It seemed a mere accident that the reflection was conducted audibly and in public rather than in the recesses of the library at Hatfield. His massive head, bowed upon his chest, his precise and measured tones, his total absence of gesture, his grave but subtle irony, sustained the illusion. It was only when the epigrams flashed forth, and the extraordinary felicity of diction overcame the barriers of reserve, that the cheers rattled along the absorbed and silent benches."

"[T]he faculty of epigram, which was too deeply rooted in him to be seriously modified, and which made his private conversation a perpetual delight, expended itself in the "blazing indiscretions" for which he attained a notoriety that amused no one more than himself."

"He was a master of language, and among whatever body of men he might have been put he would have taken a leading place. During many troubled years in his four terms of office Lord Salisbury well upheld the honour and dignity of the country. (Cheers.) As a true Englishman and gentleman he did all without menace, by courtesy of demeanour, by readiness to accept some courses suggested to him if they were not immaterial, but without losing sight of the key of the position."