ur kings liked to have lordships and dukedoms abroad: and why
should not your merchant princes like to have lordships and estates
abroad? Believe me, rightly understood, it would be a prouder, and in
the full sense of our English word, more "respectable" thing to be lord
of a palace at Verona, or of a cloister full of frescoes at Florence,
than to have a file of servants dressed in the finest liveries that ever
tailor stitched, as long as would reach from here to Bolton:--yes, and a
prouder thing to send people to travel in Italy, who would have to say
every now and then, of some fair piece of art, "Ah! this was _kept_ here
for us by the good people of Manchester," than to bring them travelling
all the way here, exclaiming of your various art treasures, "These were
_brought_ here for us, (not altogether without harm) by the good people
of Manchester."

80. "Ah!" but you say, "the Art Treasures Exhibition will pay; but
Veronese palaces won't." Pardon me. They _would_ pay, less directly, but
far more richly. Do you suppose it is in the long run good for
Manchester, or good for England, that the Continent should be in the
state it is? Do you think the perpetual fear of revolution, or the
perpetual repression of thought and energy that clouds and encumbers the
nations of Europe, is eventually profitable for _us_? Were we any the
better of the course of affairs in '48? or has the stabling of the
dragoon horses in the great houses of Italy any distinct effect in the
promotion of the cotton-trade? Not so. But every stake that you could
hold in the stability of the Continent, and every effort that you could
make to give example of English habits and principles on the Continent,
and every kind deed that you could do in relieving distress and
preventing despair on the Continent, would have tenfold reaction on the
prosperity of England, and open and urge, in a thousand unforeseen
directions, the sluices of commerce and the springs of industry.

81. I could press, if I chose, both these motives upon you, of pride and
self-interest, with more force, but these are not motives which ought to
be urged upon you at all. The only motive that I ought to put before
you is simply that it would be right to do this; that the holding of
property abroad, and the personal efforts of Englishmen to redeem the
condition of foreign nations, are among the most direct pieces of duty
which our wealth renders incumbent upon us. I do not--and in all t