Testament,--I cannot see how the state of affairs in America, with
regard to the United States government, could have been different from
what it is at this moment. We had a Heptarchy in this country, and it
was thought to be a good thing to get rid of it, and have a united
nation. If the thirty-three or thirty-four States of the American Union
can break off whenever they like, I can see nothing but disaster and
confusion throughout the whole of that continent. I say that the war, be
it successful or not, be it Christian or not, be it wise or not, is a
war to sustain the government and to sustain the authority of a great
nation; and that the people of England, if they are true to their own
sympathies, to their own history, and to their own great act of 1834, to
which reference has already been made, will have no sympathy with those
who wish to build up a great empire on the perpetual bondage of millions
of their fellow-men.

FROM THE SPEECH ON THE STATE OF IRELAND (1866)

I think I was told in 1849, as I stood in the burial ground at
Skibbereen, that at least four hundred people who had died of famine
were buried within the quarter of an acre of ground on which I was then
looking. It is a country, too, from which there has been a greater
emigration by sea within a given time than has been known at any time
from any other country in the world. It is a country where there has
been, for generations past, a general sense of wrong, out of which has
grown a chronic state of insurrection; and at this very moment when I
speak, the general safeguard of constitutional liberty is withdrawn, and
we meet in this hall, and I speak here to-night, rather by the
forbearance and permission of the Irish executive than under the
protection of the common safeguards of the rights and liberties of the
people of the United Kingdom.