Belgium, since the late war, finds herself in a new position which has not attracted the attention it deserves.
Belgium, for a long time back coveted by France, particularly by France under the Empire and under the Republic, had, above all, to fear an alliance between France and Prussia, which latter might sacrifice her to the political combinations growing out of such an alliance. That is what Napoleon III. attempted in the Benedetti negotiation, and it was this peril which before the recent war alarmed my patriotism.
Now this peril has vanished. An alliance between the German Empire and France is now put off for a long time. But there is another motive still more powerful, and which constitutes our complete security, which is this: that the existence of a neutral and strong Belgium has become henceforward for the German Empire a necessity of the highest order. Since the government of Berlin has thought it indispensable for strategic purposes to hold Metz and the lines of the Meuse and of the Vosges, it cannot allow, under any consideration, independent Belgium to disappear and France to occupy that territory of Belgium which is watered by the Meuse and the Scheldt. Our neutrality protects the Rhine on the side of the gap between the Sambre and the Meuse, but can afford this protection only provided our neutrality is politically and militarily strong to such an extent as our financial resources will warrant.
Our neutrality, in order to be one of the supports of the peace of Europe, must be ever an honest one; it must stand as a barrier against aggression whether from the east or from the south; it must be hostile to no power. On the other hand, it is plain that, in order to fill this position of barrier and guarantee, Belgium must remain always armed and able to repel an attack at the outset; otherwise, she would become politically useless, and, in the event of a war, the occupation of her territory would follow as the fatal result of such omission.
This was true before the late war, and on this point my views have not changed; but, since the new European situation created by the war, this truth is twice as plain, and our duties to Europe have increased twofold. It is important that all our political men, without distinction of party, and that the entire nation, understand well the position to which we have been brought by recent events.
Far from being hostile to the German Empire, I find in it a new guarantee for the independence of my country. Our neutrality now rests on all the powers and on all the treaties that have been made: it had become a habit, after the advent of the Napoleonic Empire, to consider England as the special protector of our national independence, but now that Germany has a particular and powerful interest in that independence, instead of one special support only, we now have two.
It is proper that I should make this statement, as I am about to submit M. von Bismarck's policy to a severe criticism. In this page of history which I have been rapidly writing, I have not been wanting in praise; and, if these lines are ever read by M. von Bismarck, he cannot complain of the appreciation which I have so far expressed [pg 483] of his policy. In the pages that follow, I shall not spare criticism. Much as I have admired the policy which prepared the war, in equal degree does my mind fail to comprehend the policy followed at Berlin since the peace, and which appears to me to be a perfect antithesis of the former one.
This latter policy appears to me so incomprehensible that I ask myself whether Prince von Bismarck, instead of being a political genius like Stein, is not entering upon the path of error in which Napoleon III. came to his ruin.
Napoleon III. has also been the ruler of Europe; the second Empire for many years enjoyed preponderance in Europe, and might have retained it much longer but for the accumulated blunders of imperial policy. Napoleon III., who had begun his reign isolated from other monarchs, and to whom the appellation of my cousin had been disdainfully denied, found himself, immediately after the war in the Crimea and after the Congress of Paris, at the head of a great Western alliance formed with England and Austria and by isolating Russia and annulling Prussia. He had reached the zenith of power in Europe; he had a star in which he and every one besides believed; kings and emperors came to Fontainebleau and to the Tuileries to pay their court to the parvenu sovereign who had been transformed into a Louis XIV., just as has happened at Berlin.
When I saw Napoleon III., at the summit of such a situation, break with his own hands, like a hot-brained child, this magnificent Western alliance to which he was indebted for his high fortune; conspire at the Congress of Paris with M. de Cavour to bring about that fatal war in Italy against Austria which was the first cause of his disasters; turn out of the straight path of conservative principles which he had sworn to follow, and then lose himself in the tortuous and obscure ways of revolution, my judgment of him was definitively made. A man who could commit such a folly was neither a statesman nor a political genius; he was merely a lucky adventurer who had been helped on and spoiled by events, but who did not know enough to turn them to account.