That is valuable as a recognition in 1870 on
the part of Germany of the sacredness of these treaty rights.
What was our own attitude? The people who laid down the attitude of the
British Government were Lord Granville in the House of Lords and Mr.
Gladstone in the House of Commons. Lord Granville on the 8th August,
1870, used these words. He said:
We might have explained to the country and to foreign nations that
we could 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 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.
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