Now, gentlemen, I am sorry to find that that which I call the pharisaical assertion of our own superiority has found its way alike into the practice, and seemingly into the theories of the government. I am not going to assert any thing which is not known, but the Prime-Minister has said that there is one day in the year—namely, the 9th of November, Lord Mayor’s Day—on which the language of sense and truth is to be heard amidst the surrounding din of idle rumors generated and fledged in the brains of irresponsible scribes. I do not agree, gentlemen, in that panegyric upon the 9th of November. I am much more apt to compare the ninth of November—certainly a well-known day in the year—but as to some of the speeches that have lately been made upon it, I am very much disposed to compare it with another day in the year, well known to British tradition, and that other day in the year is the first of April. But, gentlemen, on that day the Prime-Minister, speaking out,—I do not question for a moment his own sincere opinion,—made what I think one of the most unhappy and ominous allusions ever made by a minister of this country. He quoted certain words, easily rendered as “Empire and Liberty”—words (he said) of a Roman statesman, words descriptive of the state of Rome—and he quoted them as words which were capable of legitimate application to the position and circumstances of England.[77] I join issue with the Prime-Minister upon that subject, and I affirm that nothing can be more fundamentally unsound, more practically ruinous, than the establishment of Roman analogies for the guidance of British policy. What, gentlemen, was Rome? Rome was indeed an imperial state, you may tell me,—I know not, I cannot read the counsels of Providence,—a state having a mission to subdue the world, but a state whose very basis it was to deny the equal rights, to proscribe the independent existence of other nations. That, gentlemen, was the Roman idea. It has been partially and not ill described in three lines of a translation from Virgil by our great poet Dryden, which runs as follows:
“O Rome! ’tis thine alone with awful sway To rule mankind, and make the world obey, Disposing peace and war thine own majestic way.”