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.

German "Cultur