Stanley Baldwin: Trending quotes (page 2)

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1924/jan/21/debate-on-the-address in the House of Commons (21 January 1924).
1924
Context: The future lies between hon. Members opposite and ourselves. We are not afraid on this side of the House of social reform. Members of our party were fighting for the working classes when Members or the ancestors of Members opposite were shackled with laissez faire. Disraeli was advocating combination among agricultural labourers years before the agricultural labourer had the vote, and when he first began to preach the necessity of sanitation in the crowded centres of this country, the Liberal party called it a "policy of sewage." We stand on three basic principles, as we have done for two generations past—the maintenance of the institutions of our country, the preservation and the development of our Empire, and the improvement of the conditions of our own people; and we adapt those principles to the changing needs of each generation. Do my Friends behind me look like a beaten army? We shall be ready to take up the challenge from any party whenever it be issued, wherever it is issued and by whomsoever it be thrown down.

Speech at University of Durham to the Ashridge Fellowship, as quoted in The Times (3 December 1934); also in Christian Conservatives and the Totalitarian Challenge, 1933-40 by Philip Williamson, in The English Historical Review, Vol. 115, No. 462 (June 2000)
1934

Newsreel appearance after the general election (November 1935)
Variant: We, true to our traditions, avoided all extremes, have steered clear of fascism, communism, dictatorship, and have shown the world that democratic government, constitutional methods and ordered liberty are not inconsistent with progress and prosperity.
As quoted in Cinema, Literature & Society : Elite and Mass Culture in Interwar Britain (1987) by Peter Miles and Malcolm Smith, p. 22
1935
Context: True to our traditions, we have avoided all extremes. We have steered clear of fascism, communism, dictatorship, and we have shown the world that democratic government, constitutional methods and ordered liberty are not inconsistent with progress and prosperity.

Speech in Chippenham (12 June 1926) on the General Strike, quoted in Our Inheritance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), pp. 167-168.
1926
Context: It may have been a magnificent demonstration of the solidarity of labour, but it was at the same time a most pathetic evidence of the failure of all of us to live and work together for the good of all. I recognize the courage that it took on the part of the leaders who had taken a false step to recede from that position unconditionally... It took a great deal more courage than it takes their critics now, who are blaming them for not going straight on, whatever happened. But if that strike showed solidarity, sympathy with the miners— whatever you like— it showed something else far greater. It proved the stability of the whole fabric of our own country, and to the amazement of the world not a shot was fired. We were saved by common sense and the good temper of our own people.

Speech at the Philip Scott College (27 September 1923), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 153-154.
1923
Context: This country of ours has been the birthplace and the home of some of the greatest movements that have yet arisen for human freedom and human progress, and the strength of our race is not yet exhausted. We have confused ourselves in Great Britain of recent years by a curious diffidence, and by a fear of relying upon ourselves. The result has been that many of those who have been eager for the progress of our country have only succeeded in befogging themselves and their fellow-countrymen, by filling their bellies with the east wind of German Socialism and Russian Communism and French Syndicalism. Rather should they have looked deep into the hearts of their own people, relying on that common sense and political sense that has never failed our race.... [That] far from following at the tail of exploded Continental theorists, is ready once more to lead the way of the world as she was destined to do from the beginning of time, and to show other peoples, many peoples who have not yet learned what real political freedom is, that the mother of political freedom is still capable of guiding the way to her children and her children's children.

Speech in Winnipeg, Canada (13 August 1927), quoted in Our Inheritance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), pp. 116-117.
1927
Context: You very often hear and you sometimes read in newspapers not friendly to the British race that there signs of decadence in Great Britain. Don't you believe a word of it. The people at home are the same people who fought shoulder to shoulder with you for four years all over the world. They are the same stock which created the Maritime Provinces and Ontario. They are the same stock that built up this country. The stock is the same as it ever was, and it is as fine as it ever was.

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1937/mar/17/the-late-sir-austen-chamberlain in the House of Commons upon the death of Sir Austen Chamberlain (17 March 1937).
1937
Context: In the remote parts of that countryside where I was born and where old English phrases linger, though they may now be dying, even now I hear among those old people this phrase about those who die "He has gone home." It was a universal phrase among the old agricultural labourers, whose life was one toil from their earliest days to their last, and I think that that phrase must have arisen from the sense that one day the toil would be over and the rest would come, and that rest, the cessation of toil, wherever that occurred would be home. So they say, "He has gone home." When our long days of work are over here there is nothing in our oldest customs which so stirs the imagination of the young Member as the cry which goes down the Lobbies, "Who goes home?" Sometimes when I hear it I think of the language of my own countryside and my feeling that for those who have borne the almost insupportable burden of public life there may well be a day when they will be glad to go home. So Austen Chamberlain has gone home.... he had an infinite faith in the Parliamentary system of this country. Let us resolve once more that we can best keep his memory bright by confirming our own resolution that government of the people by the people shall never perish on this earth.

Speech to the centenary dinner of the City of London Conservative and Unionist Association (2 July 1936) on the Italo-Abyssinian War, quoted in Service of Our Lives (1937), pp. 40-41.
1936
Context: The Government decided... that they would support at Geneva the raising of "sanctions" which were imposed against Italy in the latter part of last year... but the action of the "sanctions" imposed was not swift enough in practice to effect what we had all hoped might be possible, and there came a point when further pressure might well have led to war. Now we have been called all kinds of names because we have not brought the country to war, and those who have principally criticised us have been those who hitherto have been noted for their pacifist views and not for their support of the strengthening of the arms of this country. You may not know that every day of my life, when I sit at my work in the Cabinet room, I sit under the portrait of a great Prime Minister... Sir Robert Walpole, whose great boast was, and whose great reputation rested on, this— that, except on one occasion, he kept his country out of war... to him was attributed that well-known remark, when a war against his will had been forced on him, that the people were now ringing the bells but they would soon be wringing their hands.

Baldwin to the Cabinet in 1937 during his last days as Premier, as quoted in The Collapse of British Power (1972) by Correlli Barnett, p. 449 <!-- Methuen -->
1937
Context: In none of these countries [Russia, Italy and Germany] was it possible to make to the people such an appeal as went home to the heart of our people, an appeal based on Christianity or ethics … The whole outlook in the dictator countries was so completely different from ours that for a long time people here could not understand how it was possible for these nations not to respond to the same kind of appeal as that to which our people responded. But they were beginning to realise it now... The only argument which appealed to the dictators was that of force.

Speech in Birmingham (5 March 1925), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp 33-34, p. 40.
1925
Context: I want a truce of God in this country, that we may compose our differences, that we may join all our strengths together to see if we cannot pull the country into a better and happier condition. It is little that a Government can do; these reforms, these revolutions must come from the people themselves. The organisations of employers and men, if they take their coats off to it, are far more able to work out the solutions of their troubles than the politicians... So let those who represent labour and capital get down to it, and seek and pursue peace through every alley and every corner of this country... And if I have a message to-night for you and the people of this country, it is just this. I would say: "England! Steady! Look where you are going! Human hands were given us to clasp, and not to be raised against one another in fratricidal strife."

Speech to the centenary dinner of the City of London Conservative and Unionist Association (2 July 1936), quoted in Service of Our Lives (1937), pp. 43-44.
1936
Context: I have tried so far as I can to lead this country into the way of evolutionary progress, but I have tried to warn it against revolutionary progress, and I have tried to bring about a unity of spirit in the nation. I have done that, not only because it is right in itself, but because one watches this country becoming year by year more urbanised, more industrialised, and the potential dangers to this country becoming greater and greater lest at any time and in any way her communications, the constant flow of food and of raw materials, might ever be interrupted. Her life is an artificial life, and anything that tends to upset it, to break those cords and those strings, might ruin our country in a thousandth part of the time it has taken to build it up.

Broadcast from London (6 March 1934); published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 23
1934
Context: When one is young one is always in a hurry, and it may well be to-day that those two alien plants&mdash; for they neither have their roots in England&mdash; Communism and Fascism, may appeal to many of you. This is a free country. You can support either creed, and you can support it in safety, but I want to put this to you. If there be one thing certain, to my mind it is this. That if the people of this country in great numbers were to become adherents of either Communism or Fascism there could only be one end to it. And that one end would be civil war.

Speech at the Albert Hall (4 December 1924), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 70-71.
1924
Context: It is a testing time for democracy... Democracy, democratic government, calls for harder work, for higher education, for further vision than any form of government known in this world. It has not lasted long yet in the West, and it is only by those like ourselves who believe in it making it a success that we can hope to see it permanent and yielding those fruits which it ought to yield. The assertion of people's rights has never yet provided that people with bread. The performance of their duties, and that alone, can lead to the successful issue of those experiments in government which we have carried further than any other people in this world. Democracy can rise to great heights; it can also sink to great depths. It is for us so to conduct ourselves, and so to educate our own people, that we may achieve the heights and avoid the depths.

Speech to the thirtieth anniversary of the Junior Imperial League in Kingsway Hall (19 June 1926), quoted in Our Inheritance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), pp. 17-18.
1926
Context: You have to realize that these years in which we are living, the years into which we are entering, are going to be, as no years before have been, the real testing-time of democracy... We in this country may make a fearful mess of it; and if we make a mess of it, we shall get something much worse&mdash; we shall get a tyranny of some kind or other. I don't know what form of tyranny it may be. It may be the communist tyranny; it may be tyranny from the other end. But if you cannot evolve a sound and sane democracy, that will be the fate of the country.

Speech to the Empire Rally of Youth at the Royal Albert Hall (18 May 1937), quoted in Service of Our Lives (1937), pp. 164-165.
1937
Context: Let me proclaim my faith... Here we have ceased to be an island, but we are still an Empire. And what is the secret? Freedom, ordered freedom, within the law, with force in the background and not in the foreground... It is an Empire organised for peace... It deifies neither the State nor its rulers. The old doctrine of the divine right of Kings has gone, but we have no intention of erecting in its place a new doctrine of the divine right of States. No State that ever was is worthy of a free man's worship.

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1936/dec/10/members-of-the-house-of-commons in the House of Commons on the Abdication of Edward VIII (10 December 1936).
1936
Context: I saw the King on Monday, 16th November, and I began by giving him my view of a possible marriage. I told him that I did not think that a particular marriage was one that would receive the approbation of the country. That marriage would have involved the lady becoming Queen. I did tell His Majesty once that I might be a remnant of the old Victorians, but that my worst enemy would not say of me that I did not know what the reaction of the English people would be to any particular course of action, and I told him that so far as they went I was certain that that would be impracticable.

Speech to the Classical Association (8 January 1926), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), p. 105.
1926
Context: A character founded on pietas and gravitas had its roots in truth, and I am proud to think that the English word has been held in no less honour than the Roman... It is from Ammian, who wrote while the legions were leaving Britain, that we learn that the Roman word could no longer be trusted. That is to me a far more significant portent than the aggregation of the population in cities, the immense luxury, and the exhaustion of the permanent sources of wealth, all of which combined to sap that very character whose continued existence was necessary for the life of the State.

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1925/mar/06/industrial-peace in the House of Commons (6 March 1925).
1925
Context: We find ourselves, after these two years in power, in possession of perhaps the greatest majority our party has ever had, and with the general assent of the country. Now, how did we get there? It was not by promising to bring this Bill in; it was because, rightly or wrongly, we succeeding in creating an impression throughout the country that we stood for stable Government and for peace in the country between all classes of the community... We have our majority; we believe in the justice of this Bill which has been brought in to-day, but we are going to withdraw our hand, and we are not going to push our political advantage home at a moment like this. Suspicion which has prevented stability in Europe is the one poison that is preventing stability at home, and we offer the country to-day this: We, at any rate, are not going to fire the first shot. We stand for peace. We stand for the removal of suspicion in the country. We want to create an atmosphere, a new atmosphere in a new Parliament for a new age, in which the people can come together. We abandon what we have laid our hands to. We know we may be called cowards for doing it. We know we may be told that we have gone back on our principles. But we believe we know what at this moment the country wants, and we believe it is for us in our strength to do what no other party can do at this moment, and to say that we at any rate stand for peace... Although I know that there are those who work for different ends from most of us in this House, yet there are many in all ranks and all parties who will re-echo my prayer: "Give peace in our time, O Lord."

Baldwin to the deputation at the end of July, 1936, as quoted in Baldwin : A Biography by Keith Middlemas and John Barnes (1969), p. 947, p. 955. <!-- Weidenfeld and Nicolson -->
1936
Context: We none of us know what is going on in that strange man's mind. We all know the German desire as he has come out with in his book [Mein Kampf] to move East, and if he moves East, I shall not break my heart, but that is another thing. I do not believe he wants to move West, because West would be a very difficult programme for him … If there is any fighting in Europe to be done, I should like to see the Bolsheviks and Nazis doing it.