I have been lucky enough to have had the opportunity of travelling across this country and enduring all the classic situations that go with talking to people.

In a free world there is, alas, more common crime than in a dictatorial system.

All share complicity in the destruction of that much under-rated phenomenon called liberty.

The People's Republic of China has not yet reached the military might of the Soviet Empire. It requires a little more time and a little more infusion of Western aid, loans, technology and the hard currency of our tourists.

Our society is not perfect and this will come as no surprise to many of you. But liberty, you see, that precious child of our liberal democracy only two hundred years old, has one notable side effect. When virtue is at liberty, so to some extent is vice. In a free world there is, alas, more common crime than in a dictatorial system.

It is not empty rhetoric to talk of the Free World.

There is sometimes a peculiar confusion in the West that equates progress to whatever is recent or whatever is new, and it is time we understood that progress has nothing to do with the chronology of an idea.