, and am not a little curious to
know. No man is more capable than he of doing justice to any cause which
he undertakes; and it would be most presumptuous in me to anticipate the
defence which he means to set up. But I hope that the House will suffer
me, as one who feels deeply on this subject, now to explain the
reasons which convince me that I ought to vote for the right honourable
Baronet's propositions respecting the produce of the United States. In
explaining those reasons, I at the same time explain the reasons which
induce me to vote with my noble friend to-night.

I say then, Sir, that I fully admit the paramount authority of moral
obligations. But it is important that we should accurately understand
the nature and extent of those obligations. We are clearly bound
to wrong no man. Nay, more, we are bound to regard all men with
benevolence. But to every individual, and to every society, Providence
has assigned a sphere within which benevolence ought to be peculiarly
active; and if an individual or a society neglects what lies within that
sphere in order to attend to what lies without, the result is likely to
be harm and not good.

It is thus in private life. We should not be justified in injuring a
stranger in order to benefit ourselves or those who are dearest to us.
Every stranger is entitled, by the laws of humanity, to claim from us
certain reasonable good offices. But it is not true that we are bound
to exert ourselves to serve a mere stranger as we are bound to exert
ourselves to serve our own relations. A man would not be justified in
subjecting his wife and children to disagreeable privations, in order to
save even from utter ruin some foreigner whom he never saw. And if a
man were so absurd and perverse as to starve his own family in order
to relieve people with whom he had no acquaintance, there can be
little doubt that his crazy charity would produce much more misery than
happiness.

It is the same with nations. No statesmen ought to injure other
countries in order to benefit his own country. No statesman ought to
lose any fair opportunity of rendering to foreign nations such good
offices as he can render without a breach of the duty which he owes to
the society of which he is a member. But, after all, our country is our
country, and has the first claim on our attention. There is nothing, I
conceive, of narrow-mindedness in this patriotism. I do not say that we
ought to prefer the happiness of one p