The eve of the Franco-German War was a time of great importance for the United Kingdom.  The Reform Bill of 1867 gave a great accession of power to the Liberal Party; and the General Election of November 1868 speedily led to the resignation of the Disraeli Cabinet and the accession of the Gladstone Ministry to power.  This portended change in other directions than home affairs.  The tradition of a spirited foreign policy died with Lord Palmerston in 1865.  With the entry of John Bright to the new Cabinet peace at all costs became the dominant note of British statesmanship.  There was much to be said in favour of this.  England needed a time of rest in order to cope with the discontent of Ireland and the problems brought about by the growth of democracy and commercialism in the larger island.  The disestablishment and partial disendowment of the Protestant Church in Ireland (July 1869), the Irish Land Act (August 1870), and the Education Act of 1870, showed the preoccupation of the Ministry for home affairs; while the readiness with which, a little later, they complied with all the wishes of the United States in the “Alabama” case, equally proclaimed their pacific intentions.  England, which in 1860 had exercised so powerful an influence on the Italian national question, was for five years a factor of small account in European affairs.  Far from pleasing the combatants, our neutrality annoyed both of them.  The French accused England of “deserting” Napoleon III. in his time of need—­a charge that has lately been revived by M. Hanotaux.  To this it is only needful to reply that the French Emperor entered into alliance with us at the time of the Crimean War merely for his own objects, and allowed all friendly feeling to be ended by French threats of an invasion of England in 1858 and his shabby treatment of Italy in the matter of Savoy and Nice a year later.  On his side, Bismarck also complained that our feeling for the German cause went no further than “theoretical sympathy,” and that “during the war England never compromised herself so far in our favour as to endanger her friendship with France.  On the contrary.”  These vague and enigmatic charges at bottom only express the annoyance of the combatants at their failure to draw neutrals into the strife[10].

[10] Hanotaux, Contemporary France, vol. i. p. 9 (Eng. ed.); Bismarck:  his Reflections and Reminiscences, vol. ii. p. 61.  The popular Prussian view about England found expression in the comic paper Kladderdatsch:—­

Deutschland beziehe billige Sympathien Und Frankreich theures Kriegsmateriel.

The traditions of the United States, of course, forbade their intervention in the Franco-Prussian dispute.  By an article of their political creed termed the Monroe Doctrine, they asserted their resolve not to interfere in European affairs and to prevent the interference of any strictly European State in those of the New World.  It was on this rather vague doctrine that they cried “hands off” from Mexico to the French Emperor; and the abandonment of his protege, the so-called Emperor Maximilian, by French troops, brought about the death of that unhappy prince and a sensible decline in the prestige of his patron (June 1867).