The Earl of Beaconsfield, who was received with repeated plaudits,
said....
“During these twelve months of anxiety and agitation, my Lord Mayor, I
would take this opportunity of stating what have been the two great
objects which Her Majesty’s Government have proposed with reference to
those critical circumstances which have occurred since I had the honour
of addressing your predecessor. The first has been the maintenance
of the general peace of Europe, which involves almost every other
consideration that may affect the interests of this country and the
general welfare of humanity. We have believed that that peace would be
best maintained by an observance of the treaties in which all the Great
Powers of Europe have joined. Those treaties are not antique and dusty
obsolete documents. They are not instruments devised under a state of
circumstances different from those that exist, and ill adapted to the
spirit of the age in which we live....
“... As the Lord Mayor has told us to-night, there is no country so
interested in the maintenance of peace as England. Peace is especially
an English policy. She is not an aggressive Power, for there is nothing
that she desires. She covets no cities and no provinces. What she
wishes is to maintain and to enjoy the unexampled Empire which she
has built up, and which it is her pride to remember exists as much
upon sympathy as upon force. But, although the policy of England is
peace, there is no country so well prepared for war as our own. If she
enters into conflict in a righteous cause--and I will not believe that
England will go to war except for a righteous cause--if the contest is
one which concerns her liberty, her independence, or her Empire, her
resources, I feel, are inexhaustible. She is not a country that, when
she enters into a campaign, has to ask herself whether she can support
a second or a third campaign. She enters into a campaign which she will
not terminate till right is done.”