There is, I admit, the
obligation of the treaty. It is not necessary, nor would time permit
me, to enter into the complicated question of the nature of the
obligations of that treaty; but I am not able to subscribe to the
doctrine of those who have held in this House what plainly amounts to
an assertion, that the simple fact of the existence of a guarantee
is binding on every party to it irrespectively altogether of the
particular position in which it may find itself at the time when the
occasion for acting on the guarantee arises. The great authorities
upon foreign policy to whom I have been accustomed to listen--such as
Lord Aberdeen and Lord Palmerston--never, to my knowledge, took that
rigid and, if I may venture to say so, that impracticable view of
a guarantee. The circumstance that there is already an existing
guarantee in force is of necessity an important fact, and a weighty
element in the case, to which we are bound to give full and ample
consideration. There is also this further consideration, the force of
which we must all feel most deeply, and that is the common interest
against the unmeasured aggrandizement of any Power whatever. But there
is one other motive, which I shall place at the head of all, that
attaches peculiarly to the preservation of the independence of
Belgium. What is that country? It is a country containing 4,000,000 or
5,000,000 of people, with much of an historic past, and imbued with a
sentiment of nationality and a spirit of independence as warm and as
genuine as that which beats in the hearts of the proudest and most
powerful nations.
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