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. 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 honour
and interests are, at least, as strong to-day as in 1870, and
we cannot take a more narrow view or a lass 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