Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 10.djvu/38

 THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS

customers educated, intelligent, moral, and rich, out of Liverpool as it is in Liverpool. [Applause. ] They are able to buy; they want variety, they want the very best ; and those are the customers you want. That nation is the best customer that is freest, because freedom works prosperity, in- dustry, and wealth. Great Britain, then, aside from moral considerations, has a direct com- mercial and pecuniary interest in the liberty, civilization, and wealth of every people and every nation on the globe. [Loud applause.]

You have also an interest in this, because you are a moral and a religious people. ["Oh, oh!" Laughter and applause.] You desire "it from the highest motives, and godliness is profitable in all things, having the promise of the life that is, as well as of that which is to come; but if there were no hereafter, and if man had no progress in this life, and if there were no ques- tion of moral growth at all, it would be worth your while to protect civilization and liberty, merely as a commercial speculation. To evan- gelize has more than a moral and religious im- port — it comes back to temporal relations. Wher- ever a nation that is crushed, cramped, degraded under despotism, is struggling to be free, you, Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, Paisley, all have an interest that that nation should be free. When depressed and backward people demand that they may have a chance to rise — Hungary, Italy, Poland — it is a duty for humanity's sake, it is a duty for the highest moral motives, to

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