Gladstone in the House of Commons. Lord Granville, on the 8th of
August, 1870, used these words. He said:
We might have explained to the country and to foreign
nations that we did not think this country was bound
either morally or internationally, or that its interests were
concerned in the maintenance of the neutrality of Belgium.
Though this course might have had some conveniences,
though it might have been easy to adhere to it, though it
might have saved us from some immediate danger, it is
a course which Her Majesty's Government thought it impossible
to adopt in the name of the country with any due
regard to the country's honour or to the country's interests.
Mr. Gladstone spoke as follows two days later:
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 the guarantee.
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