Nay, you must sympathize in certain circumstances with one nation more
than another. You sympathize most with those nations, as a rule, with
which you have the closest connexion in language, in blood, and
in religion, or whose circumstances at the time seem to give the
strongest claim to sympathy. But in point of right all are equal, and
you have no right to set up a system under which one of them is to be
placed under moral suspicion or espionage, or to be made the constant
subject of invective. If you do that, but especially if you claim for
yourself a superiority, a pharisaical superiority over the whole of
them, then I say you may talk about your patriotism if you please, but
you are a misjudging friend of your country, and in undermining the
basis of the esteem and respect of other people for your country you
are in reality inflicting the severest injury upon it. I have now
given you, gentlemen, five principles of foreign policy. Let me give
you a sixth, and then I have done.
And that sixth is, that in my opinion foreign policy, subject to all
the limitations that I have described, the foreign policy of England
should always be inspired by the love of freedom. There should be a
sympathy with freedom, a desire to give it scope, founded not upon
visionary ideas, but upon the long experience of many generations
within the shores of this happy isle, that in freedom you lay the
firmest foundations both of loyalty and order; the firmest foundations
for the development of individual character, and the best provision
for the happiness of the nation at large.
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