Defense of Small States.

I quote you the exact words he used in the House of Commons, they are so applicable to the circumstances of the present moment.  This is in 1793: 

England will never consent that another country should arrogate the power of annulling, at her pleasure, the political system of Europe, established by solemn treaties and guaranteed by the consent of the powers. [Cheers.]

He went on to say: 

     This House [the House of Commons] means substantial good faith to
     its engagements.  If it retains a just sense of the solemn faith of
     treaties, it must show a determination to support them.

And it was in consequence of that stubborn and unyielding determination to maintain treaties to defend small States, to resist the aggressive domination of a single power, that we were involved in a war which we had done everything to avoid, and which was carried on upon a scale, both as to area and as to duration, up to then unexampled in the history of mankind.  That is one precedent.  Let me give you one more.

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.