I come down to 1870, when this very treaty to which we are parties, no less than Germany, and which guarantees the integrity and independence of Belgium, was threatened. Mr. Gladstone was then Prime Minister of this country, [cheers,] and he was, if possible, a stronger and more ardent advocate of peace even than Mr. Pitt himself. ["Hear, hear!">[
Mr. Gladstone's Dictum.
Mr. Gladstone, pacific as he was, felt so strongly the sanctity of our obligations that—though here again we had no direct interest of any kind at stake—he made agreements with France and Prussia to co-operate with either of the belligerents if the other violated Belgian territory, and I should like to read a passage from a speech ten years later, delivered in 1880, by Mr. Gladstone himself in this city, in which he reviewed that transaction and explained his reasons for it. He said: "If we had gone to war"—which he was prepared to do—"we should have gone to war for freedom; we should have gone to war for public right; we should have gone to war to save human happiness from being invaded by tyrannous and lawless power." That is what I call a good cause, though I detest war, and there are no epithets too strong if you will supply me with them that I will not endeavor to heap upon its head.
So much for our own action in the past in regard to treaties and small States. But faint as is this denial of this part of our case, it becomes fainter still, it dissolves into the thinnest of thin air, when it has to deal with our contention that we and our allies are withstanding a power whose aim is nothing less than the domination of Europe. ["Hear, hear!">[
It is, indeed, the avowed belief of the leaders of German thought—I will not say of the German people—of those who for many years past have controlled German policy, that such a domination, carrying with it the supremacy of what they call German culture [laughter] and the German spirit is the best thing that could happen to the world.
German "Culture."
Let me then ask for a moment what is this German culture, what is this German spirit of which the Emperor's armies are at present the missionaries in Belgium and in France? [Laughter.] Mankind owes much to Germany, a very great debt for the contributions she has made to philosophy, to science and to the arts; but that which is specifically German in the movement of the world in the last thirty years has been, on the intellectual side, the development of the doctrine of the supreme and ultimate prerogative in human affairs of material forces, and, on the practical side, taking of the foremost place in the fabrication and the multiplication of the machinery of destruction.
To the men who have adopted this gospel, who believe that power is the be all and end all of the State, naturally a treaty is nothing more than a piece of parchment, and all the Old World talk about the rights of the weak and the obligations of the strong is only so much threadbare and nauseating cant, for one very remarkable feature of this new school of doctrine is, whatever be its intellectual or its ethical merits, that it has turned out as an actual code for life to be a very purblind philosophy.
The German culture, the German spirit, did not save the Emperor and his people from delusions and miscalculations as dangerous as they were absurd in regard to the British Empire.
A Fantastic Dream.