Mr. W. E. Gladstone
There were other days when England forsook the cause of freedom, when the eyes of the oppressed and the humbled were turned in vain to this favourite, this darling home of so much privilege and so much happiness, where it seemed that no high aspiration was any more entertained, and whence it was doubtful that any noble blow would again be struck, where the people that had built so noble an edifice for them- selves were no longer ready to do what in them lay to secure the benefit of the same inestimable boon to others, permitting the banner which once they had carried so high in the eye of heaven to droop at its staff, until one man assisted them to raise it again, appealing, as once it had been necessary for me to appeal, to the established tradition, older, wiser, nobler far than the pretended traditional policies by which this nation has so often been misled, a tradition not which disregarded British interests, but which taught the people to seek for the promotion of those interests in obeying the dictates of honour and justice, in following the laws, given to us in trust by Him who alone is our guide, of truth and right, by whose sanction only dare we claim the leadership of the nations, among whom our ascendancy rests, not on military power or industrial predominance, but on the steadfastness with which we hold to the course of duty, to which the litnourable gentleman called you and your fellow-countrymen, in the rightful defence of the peoples of Poland and Czechoslovakia, as I did once to the aid of the Christians of Armenia.
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