applicable.
The mode of expressing any view of this matter is doubtless a
question requiring much consideration. The decision of the cabinet
was that the time for it had not yet come. Any declaration in the
sense described would, Mr. Gladstone thought, entail, in fairness,
an obligation to repudiate the present claim of France to obtain
peace without surrendering "either an inch of her territory or a
stone of her fortresses."

Mr. Bright did not agree with him, but rather favoured the principle of
inviolability. In November Mr. Gladstone prepared a still more elaborate
memorandum in support of a protest from the neutral Powers. The Duke of
Argyll put what was perhaps the general view when he wrote to Mr.
Gladstone (Nov. 25, 1870), "that he had himself never argued in favour of
the German annexation of Alsace and Lorraine, but only against our having
any right to oppose it otherwise than by the most friendly dissuasion."
The Duke held that the consent of populations to live under a particular
government is a right subject to a great many qualifications, and it would
not be easy to turn such a doctrine into the base of an official
remonstrance. After all, he said, the instincts of nations stand for
something in this world. The German did not exceed the ancient
acknowledged right of nations in successful wars, when he said to Alsace
and Lorraine, "Conquest in a war forced upon me by the people of which you
form a part, gives me the _right_ to annex, if on other grounds I deem it
expedient, and for strategic reasons I do so deem it."

Mr. Gladstone, notwithstanding his cabinet, held to his view energetically
expressed as follows:--

If the contingency happen, not very probable, of a sudden
accommodation which shall include the throttling of Alsace and
part of Lorraine, without any voice previously raised against it,
it will in my opinion be a standing reproach to England. There is
indeed the Russian plan of not recognising that in which we have
had no part; but it is difficult to say what this comes to.

On December 20 he says to Lord Granville what we may take for a last word
on this part of the case: "While I more and more feel the deep culpability
of France, I have an apprehension that this violent laceration and
transfer is to lead us from bad to worse, and to be the _beginning_ of a
new series of European complications."

While working in the spirit of cord