"As long as it effects working men in England or Nationalist peasants in Ireland, there is no measure of military force which the Tory Party will not readily employ. They denounce all violence except their own. They uphold all law except the law they choose to break. (Cheers.) They always welcome the application of force to others. (Laughter.) But they themselves are to remain immune. They are to select from the Statute-book the laws they will obey and the laws they will resist. They claim to be a party in the State free to use force in all directions, but never to have it applied to themselves. Whether in office or in opposition, as they have very often told us, they are to govern the country. If they cannot do it by the veto of privilege, they will do it by the veto of violence. If constitutional methods serve their ends, they will be Constitutionalists. If law suits their purpose, they will be law-abiding, aye, and law-enforcing. When social order means the order of the Tory Party, when social order means the order of the propertied classes against the wage-earner, when social order means the master against the man, or the landlord against the tenant, order is sacred and holy, order is dear to the heart of the Tory Party and order must be maintained by force. But if it should happen that the Constitution, or the law, or the maintenance of order stand in the path of some Tory project, stand in the path of the realisation of some appetite or ambition which they have conceived, then they vie with the wildest anarchists in the language which they use against the Constitution, against the law, and against all order and all means of maintaining order. And that is the political doctrine with which they salute the 20th century. (Cheers.)"
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Nobel laureates in LiteraturePeople from OxfordPrime Ministers of the United KingdomPoliticians from EnglandHistorians from England
Original Language: English
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Speech in Bradford (14 March 1914), quoted in The Times (16 March 1914), p. 13
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill
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Winston Churchill
1874 – 1965
britischer Politiker
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