It is just so now, for unfortunately there still remains the disposition to be excited on these questions. Some poet, I forget which it is,* has said:
Religion, freedom, vengeance, what you will,
A word’s enough to raise mankind to kill;
Some cunning phrase by faction caught and spread.
That guilt may reign, and wolves and worms be fed.
Some cunning phrase by faction caught and spread like the cunning phrase of ‘The balance of power’, which has been described as the ghastly phantom which the Government of this country has been pursuing for two centuries and has ‘never yet overtaken.’* Some cunning phrase like that we have now of ‘British interests.’
Lord Derby* has said the wisest thing that has been uttered by any member of this Administration during the discussions on this war when he said that the greatest of British interests is peace. And a hundred, far more than a hundred, public meetings have lately said the same; and millions of households of men and women have thought the same. To-night we shall say ‘Amen’ to this wise declaration.
From Public Addresses by John Bright (1879), edited by James E. Thorold Rogers.
* The poet is Byron. The lines come from Lara, Canto II.8. Bright’s memory was slightly at fault for the third line. Byron wrote: ‘Some factious phrase by cunning caught and spread’.
* Edward Henry Stanley (1826-1893), 15th Earl of Derby, was Benjamin Disraeli’s Foreign Secretary from February 1874 to April 1878. Bright generally had a poor opinion of the Foreign Office but Lord Derby was an anti-interventionist, and thus much more to his taste. Disraeli himself was no friend to Russia; his arch-rival William Gladstone, however, was bitterly critical of Turkey.
* From The Stripling by Joanna Baillie (1762-1851), Act IV Scene 1: “This will be triumph! this will be happiness! yea, that very thing, happiness, which I have been pursuing all my life, and have never yet overtaken”. ‘The Balance of Power’ was the idea that the Great Powers (at that time chiefly Britain, France, Germany, Turkey and Russia) should agree a mutually acceptable division of Europe in order to prevent bloodshed.