But I can give Mr. Eliot here some authority
that he has so far not challenged. When Sir Edward Grey presented the
English case in the House of Commons on the 3d of August he declared
that the British attitude was laid down by the British Government in
1870, and he verbally cited Mr. Gladstone's speech, in which he said he
could not subscribe to the assertion that the simple fact of the
existence of a guarantee was binding on every party, irrespective
altogether of the particular position in which it may find itself at the
time when the occasion for acting on the guarantee arises. He called
that assertion a "stringent and impracticable" view of the guarantee and
the whole treaty a "complicated question." So Mr. Gladstone, and with
him Sir Edward Grey, has held the Belgian neutrality treaty not binding
on every party, when it was against the interest which the particular
situation dictated, when the war broke out. It was the interest of Great
Britain to maintain the treaty, and that is why she acted. It was
against German interest to maintain the treaty, and that is why she
broke it. That is the British and not the German theory, and I could
very well rest my case here.
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