“Her Majesty's present Ministers have hitherto been enabled to secure that peace, so necessary to the welfare of all the civilized countries, and so peculiarly the interest of our own. But this ineffable blessing cannot be obtained by the passive principle of non-interference. Peace rests on the presence, not to say the ascendancy, of England in the Councils of Europe. ... May [the election] return to Westminster a Parliament not unworthy of the power of England and resolved to maintain it!”

Source: Election address; letter to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Duke of Marlborough (8 March 1880), quoted in The Times (9 March 1880), p. 8

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Nov. 18, 2022. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Her Majesty's present Ministers have hitherto been enabled to secure that peace, so necessary to the welfare of all the…" by Benjamin Disraeli?
Benjamin Disraeli photo
Benjamin Disraeli 306
British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Pri… 1804–1881

Related quotes

Charles James Fox photo

“I stand, said Mr. Fox, upon this great principle. I say that the people of England have a right to control the executive power, by the interference of their representatives in this House of parliament. The right honourable gentleman [William Pitt] maintains the contrary. He is the cause of our political enmity.”

Charles James Fox (1749–1806) British Whig statesman

Speech in the House of Commons (27 February 1786), reprinted in J. Wright (ed.), The Speeches of the Rt. Hon. C. J. Fox in the House of Commons. Volume III (1815), p. 201.
1780s

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury photo
Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston photo

“It has been said that that which has made England a great and an energetic nation, is the principle heretofore acted upon of maintaining a very low Peace establishment, while the Peace establishments of the continent have been uniformly high. I do not agree in that view of the subject. For my own part, I believe much of our financial embarrassment to have been caused by our former low Peace establishments, and to this circumstance the failure of many of our military operations may be traced.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Speech in the House of Commons (25 April 1816), quoted in George Henry Francis, Opinions and Policy of the Right Honourable Viscount Palmerston, G.C.B., M.P., &c. as Minister, Diplomatist, and Statesman, During More Than Forty Years of Public Life (London: Colburn and Co., 1852), p. 14.
1810s

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington photo

“The foreign policy of England should be to maintain peace, not only for herself but between the powers of the world. This should be her policy, not only because she can have no interest in a change of the state of possession of the several powers...but because she has the most extensive commercial relations depending upon peace with each and all the powers of the world, the interruption of which must be injurious to her prosperity.”

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (1769–1852) British soldier and statesman

Letter to John Wilson Croker (30 September 1833), quoted in L. J. Jennings (ed.), The Croker Papers: The Correspondence and Diaries of the Late Right Honourable John Wilson Croker, LL.D., F.R.S., Secretary to the Admiralty from 1809 to 1830, Vol. II (1884), p. 218

Edmund Burke photo
Stanley Baldwin photo

“England is the natural home of liberty and free institutions, and in her endeavour to secure these blessings for the world no country ought to be quicker than she in acknowledging her debt to Hellas.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the annual meeting of the British School at Athens in London (2 November 1926), quoted in Our Inheritance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), p. 205.
1926
Context: September of the year 490 B. C. was to my mind a more cardinal moment of fate for Europe than August 1914. Western civilization... was saved in its infancy at Marathon, and ten years later by Leonidas and by the men of Salamis... had it not been for that decade there would have been nothing to prevent Eastern Europe being orientalized and the ultimate fight for the hegemony of Europe would have been left to the Persians and the Carthaginians. But for the Greeks there would have been no civilization as we know it, and we should all have been dark-skinned people with long noses... England is the natural home of liberty and free institutions, and in her endeavour to secure these blessings for the world no country ought to be quicker than she in acknowledging her debt to Hellas.

Benjamin Disraeli photo
Benjamin Disraeli photo

“In assuming that peace will be maintained, I assume also that no Great Power would shrink from its responsibilities. If there be a country, for example, one of the most extensive and wealthiest of empires in the world—if that country, from a perverse interpretation of its insular geographical position, turns an indifferent ear to the feelings and the fortunes of Continental Europe, such a course would, I believe, only end in its becoming an object of general plunder. So long as the power and advice of England are felt in the councils of Europe, peace, I believe, will be maintained, and maintained for a long period. Without their presence, war, as has happened before, and too frequently of late, seems to me to be inevitable. I speak on this subject with confidence to the citizens of London, because I know that they are men who are not ashamed of the Empire which their ancestors created; because I know that they are not ashamed of the noblest of human sentiments, now decried by philosophers—the sentiment of patriotism; because I know they will not be beguiled into believing that in maintaining their Empire they may forfeit their liberties. One of the greatest of Romans, when asked what were his politics, replied, Imperium et Libertas.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

That would not make a bad programme for a British Ministry. It is one from which Her Majesty's advisers do not shrink.
Source: Speech at the Guildhall, London (9 November 1879), cited in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, Vol. 2 (1929), pp. 1366-7.

Barack Obama photo
John Locke photo

Related topics