not
to resign office.

Our sympathies are unquestionably due to a minister who, finding
himself placed, by no act of his own, in a situation of the utmost
perplexity, resolves to take no account of his political reputation
and personal interests, and to choose the course that he believes to
be necessary, in arduous circumstances, for the honour and safety of
his country. To a British prime minister his duty would have been
clear, he would have tendered his resignation immediately; but under
the Liberal Empire the ultimate decision upon questions before the
Cabinet still lay with the sovereign, and thus the responsibilities of
his principal minister remained ambiguous and indefinite.
Nevertheless, though it is easy to be wise after the event, our
opinion must be that M. Ollivier would have done his country better
service by resigning office; for though it is very probable that war
could not have been thereby averted, yet unqualified disapproval of
the demand for guarantees might have rallied to his side all those
who, in the Cabinet, the Chamber, and the country, were undoubtedly
opposed to incurring terrible risks in order to obtain pledges against
future contingencies. Among the late Lord Acton's _Historical Essays_
there is a remarkable paper on 'The Causes of the Franco-Prussian
War,' in which the considerations that may justify Gramont's demand
for guarantees are fairly stated. It is there argued that the Prussian
king, who had first 'sanctioned' Prince Leopold's candidature, and
afterwards its withdrawal, had left the initiative in both cases to
Prince Leopold. He had thus kept himself quite free to sanction a
second acceptance as he had done the first--'he held in his hands a
convenient _casus belli_, to be used or dropped at pleasure';
remembering that the Hohenzollern candidature had been 'a meditated
offence, long and carefully prepared, insolently denied, which
demanded reparation.'[50] But one might reply that the best way of
foiling these deep and deliberate designs, manifestly contrived to
provoke war, was to give the adversary no such plausible pretext for
driving France into hostilities as was furnished to Bismarck by
Gramont's demand. It is evident, however, that in July 1870 all Paris
was in a state of irrepressible agitation, that the Imperialists in
the Chamber were determined to push the Government into a defiant and
warlike policy, and that they were acting in the foolhardy conviction
that the Fre