In England opinion veered round after Sedan. The disappearance of the French empire had effectively dispelled the vivid suspicions of aggression. The creation of the empire of a united Germany showed a new Europe. The keen word of an English diplomatist expressed what was dawning in men's minds as a new misgiving. “Europe,” he said, “has lost a mistress and got a master.” Annexation wore an ugly look. Meetings to express sympathy with France in her struggle were held in London and the provinces. Still on the whole the general verdict seemed to be decisively in favour of a resolute neutrality, for in fact, nobody who knew anything of the state of Europe could suggest a policy of British intervention that would stand an hour of debate.
One proposal favoured by Mr. Gladstone, and also, I remember, commended by Mill, was the military neutralisation of Alsace and Lorraine, and the dismantling of the great border fortresses, without withdrawing the inhabitants from their French allegiance. The idea was worked out in a pamphlet by Count Gasparin. On this pamphlet Mr. Max Müller put what Mr. Gladstone called the fair question, whether its author was likely to persuade the European powers to guarantee border neutrality. “I will try to give you a fair answer,” Mr. Gladstone said (Jan. 30, 1871). “You will not think it less fair because it is individual and unofficial; for a man must be a wretch indeed, who could speak at this most solemn juncture, otherwise than from the bottom of his heart. First, then, I agree with you in disapproving the declaration, or reputed declaration, of Lord Derby (then Stanley) in 1867, about the Luxemburg guarantee. I have in parliament and in my present office, declined or expressly forborne to recognise that declaration.[231] Secondly, as to the main question. It [pg 358] is great. It is difficult. But I should not despair. I may add I should desire to find it practicable; for I think it would be a condition fair to both parties, and one on which Germany would have an absolute title to insist. Some of the most excusable errors ever committed,” he said, in closing the letter, “have also been the most ruinous in their consequences. The smallest in the forum of conscience, they are the greatest in the vast theatre of action. May your country, justly indignant and justly exultant, be preserved from committing one of these errors.” Three months later, when all was at an end, he repeated the same thought:—
The most fatal and in their sequel most gigantic errors of men are also frequently the most excusable and the least gratuitous. They are committed when a strong impetus of right carries them up to a certain point, and a residue of that impetus, drawn from the contact with human passion and infirmity, pushes them beyond it. They vault into the saddle; they fall on the other side. The instance most commonly present to my mind is the error of England in entering the Revolutionary war in 1793. Slow sometimes to go in, she is slower yet to come out, and if she had then held her hand, the course of the revolution and the fate of Europe would in all likelihood have been widely different. There might have been no Napoleon. There might have been no Sedan.
The changes in the political map effected by these dire months of diplomacy and war were almost comparable in one sense to those of the treaty of Münster, or the treaty of the Pyrenees, or the treaties of Vienna, save that those great instruments all left a consolidated Europe. Italy had crowned her work by the acquisition of Rome. Russia had wiped out the humiliation of 1856. Prussia, after three wars in six years, had conquered the primacy of a united Germany. Austria had fallen as Prussia rose. France had fallen, but she had shaken off a government that had no root in the noblest qualities of her people.
Chapter VII. “Day's Work Of A Giant”. (1870-1872)
We have not been an idle government. We have had an active life, and that is substantially one of the conditions of a happy life.... I am thankful to have been the leader of the liberal party at a period of the history of this country, when it has been my privilege and my duty to give the word of advance to able coadjutors and trusty and gallant adherents.—Gladstone.
I
The most marked administrative performance of Mr. Gladstone's great government was the reform and reorganisation of the army. In Mr. Cardwell he was fortunate enough to have a public servant of the first order; not a political leader nor a popular orator, but one of the best disciples of Peel's school; sound, careful, active, firm, and with an enlightened and independent mind admirably fitted for the effective despatch of business. Before he had been a month at the war office, the new secretary of state submitted to Mr. Gladstone his ideas of a plan that would give us an effective force for defence at a greatly reduced cost. The reorganisation of the army was one of the results of that great central event, from which in every direction such momentous consequences flowed—the victory of Prussian arms at Sadowa. The victory was a surprise, for even Lord Clyde, after a close inspection of the Prussian army, had found no more to report than that it was a first-rate militia. Sadowa disclosed that a soldier, serving only between two and three years with the colours, could yet show himself the most formidable combatant in Europe. The principle of Cardwell's plan was that short enlistment is essential to a healthy organisation of the army, and this reform it was that produced an efficient reserve, the necessity for which had [pg 360] been one of the lessons of the Crimean war. A second, but still a highly important element, was the reduction of the whole force serving in the colonies from fifty thousand men to less than half that number.[232] “To this change,” said Mr. Cardwell, “opposition will be weak, for the principle of colonial self-reliance is very generally assented to.” The idea, as Lord Wolseley says, that a standing army during peace should be a manufactory for making soldiers rather than either a costly receptacle for veterans, or a collection of perfectly trained fighters, “had not yet taken, hold of the military mind in England.”[233] The details do not concern us here, and everybody knows the revolution effected by the changes during Mr. Gladstone's great administration in the composition, the working, and the professional spirit of the army.