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 honor 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. 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 interests
against the unmeasured aggrandizement of any power whatever.

The treaty is an old treaty--1839--and that was the view taken of it in
1870. It is one of those treaties which are founded, not only on
consideration for Belgium, which benefits under the treaty, but in the
interests of those who guarantee the neutrality of Belgium. The honor
and interests are, at least, as strong today as in 1870, and we cannot
take a more narrow view or a less serious view of our obligations, and
of the importance of those obligations, than was taken by Mr.
Gladstone's Government in 1870.

I will read to the House what took place last week on this subject. When
mobilization was beginning, I knew that this question must be a most
important element in our policy--a most important subject for the House
of Commons. I telegraphed at the same time in similar terms to both
Paris and Berlin to say that it was essential for us to know whether the
French and German Gove