If one twentieth part of what has been said is true, if I am
entitled to any measure of your approbation, I may begin to think
that my public career and my opinions are not so un-English and so
anti-national as some of those who profess to be the best of our
public instructors have sometimes assumed. How, indeed, can I, any
more than any of you, be un-English and anti-national? Was I not born
upon the same soil? Do I not come of the same English stock? Are not
my family committed irrevocably to the fortunes of this country?
Is not whatever property I may have depending as much as yours is
depending upon the good government of our common fatherland? Then how
shall any man dare to say to any one of his countrymen, because he
happen to hold a different opinion on questions of great public
policy, that therefore he is un-English, and is to be condemned as
anti-national? There are those who would assume that between my
countrymen and me, and between my constituents and me, there has been,
and there is now, a great gulf fixed, and that if I cannot pass over
to them and to you, they and you can by no possibility pass over to
me.
Now I take the liberty here, in the presence of an audience as
intelligent as can be collected within the limits of this island,
and of those who have the strongest claim to know what opinions I do
entertain relative to certain great questions of public policy, to
assert that I hold no views, that I have never promulgated any views
on those controverted questions with respect to which I cannot bring
as witnesses in my favour, and as fellow believers with myself,
some of the best and most revered names in the history of English
statesmanship.
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