I am not here to flatter either England or any of them. They
have selfish aims, as, unfortunately, we in late years have too sadly
shown that we too have had selfish aims; but then, common action is
fatal to selfish aims. Common action means common objects; and the
only objects for which you can unite together the Powers of Europe are
objects connected with the common good of them all. That, gentlemen,
is my third principle of foreign policy.

My fourth principle is--that you should avoid needless and entangling
engagements. You may boast about them; you may brag about them. You
may say you are procuring consideration for the country. You may say
that an Englishman can now hold up his head among the nations. You may
say that he is now not in the hands of a Liberal Ministry, who thought
of nothing but pounds, shillings, and pence. But what does all this
come to, gentlemen? It comes to this, that you are increasing your
engagements without increasing your strength; and if you increase
engagements without increasing strength, you diminish strength, you
abolish strength; you really reduce the Empire and do not increase it.
You render it less capable of performing its duties; you render it an
inheritance less precious to hand on to future generations.

My fifth principle is this, gentlemen, to acknowledge the equal rights
of all nations. You may sympathize with one nation more than another.
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, s