Did these changes render the
guarantees of the Treaty of 1839 obsolete and thereby abrogate them, or
at least weaken them and make them an uncertain reliance? The test of
this came in the year 1870, at the beginning of hostilities between
France and the North German Union. Great Britain, the power most
interested in the maintenance of Belgian neutrality, seems to have had
considerable apprehension about it. Mr. Gladstone, then Prime Minister,
said in the House of Commons: "I am not able to subscribe to the
doctrine of those who have held in this House what plainly amounts to an
assertion that the simple fact of the existence of a guarantee is
binding on every party to it, irrespective altogether of the particular
position in which it may find itself when the occasion for acting on the
guarantee arises."
A One-Year Treaty.
Proceeding upon this view, the British Government then sought and
procured from the French Government and from the Government of the North
German Union separate but identical treaties guaranteeing with the
British Government the neutrality of Belgium during the period of the
war between France and the North German Union, the so-called
Franco-Prussian war, which had just broken out, and for one year from
the date of its termination.
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