Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 by John Bright

Author:John Bright [Bright, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politikwissenschaft
Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
Published: 2017-08-10T22:00:00+00:00

IV. MR. ROEBUCK'S MOTION FOR RECOGNITION OF THE SOUTHERN CONFEDERACY. HOUSE OF COMMONS, JUNE 30, 1863.

I will not attempt to follow the noble Lord in the laboured attack which he has made upon the Treasury Bench, for these two reasons:—that he did not appear to me very much to understand what it was he was condemning them for; and, again, I am not in the habit of defending Gentlemen who sit on that bench. I will address myself to the question before the House, which I think the House generally feels to be very important, although I am quite satisfied that they do not feel it to be a practical one. Neither do I think that the House will be disposed to take any course in support of the hon. Gentleman who introduced the resolution now before us.

We sometimes are engaged in discussions, and have great difficulty to know what we are about; but the hon. Gentleman left us in no kind of doubt when he sat down. He proposed a resolution, in words which, under certain circumstances and addressed to certain parties, might end in offensive or injurious consequences. Taken in connection with his character, and with the speech he has made tonight, and with the speech he has recently made elsewhere on this subject, I may say that he would have come to about the same conclusion if he had proposed to address the Crown inviting the Queen to declare war against the United States of America. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is known not to be very zealous in the particular line of opinion that I have adopted, addressed the hon. Gentleman in the smoothest language possible, but still he was obliged to charge him with the tone of bitter hostility which marked his speech.

On a recent occasion the hon. Member addressed some members of his constituency—I do not mean in his last speech, I mean in the speech in August last year—in which he entered upon a course of prophecy which, like most prophecies in our day, does not happen to come true. But he said then what he said to-night, that the American people and Government were overbearing. He did not tell his constituents that the Government of the United States had, almost during the whole of his lifetime, been conducted by his friends of the South. He said that, if they were divided, they would not be able to bully the whole world; and he made use of these expressions: 'The North will never be our friends; of the South you can make friends,—they are Englishmen,—they are not the scum and refuse of the world.'

Mr. Roebuck: 'Allow me to correct that statement. What I said I now state to the House, that the men of the South were Englishmen, but that the army of the North was composed of the scum of Europe.'

Mr. Bright: I take, of course, that explanation of the hon. and learned Gentleman, with this explanation from me, that there

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