Note 335 — Chapter XV · FALL OF THE SECOND EMPIRE.

Lord Granville has himself admitted that the weak point in the policy of neutrality adopted by the Government was its starting-point. The war was plainly and deliberately aggressive on the part of France. If England had offered to head a league of neutral Powers in joining Prussia to repel unprovoked French aggression, France would not have drawn her sword. A great precedent would have been created for the establishment of an international police of neutrals for keeping the peace of Europe. At the Lord Mayor’s Banquet on the 9th of November, Lord Granville discussed this view very honestly and very candidly. His reply was that the peevish jealousy with which France regarded the growing power of Germany rendered the outbreak of war inevitable, and that the menace of the neutral Powers would at best have postponed the fray for a brief period. But these menaces might have failed, and then the area of war would have been widened, the combatants multiplied, and the struggle could not have been conducted, as it was, under the restraining neutral criticism which did much to temper the passions and mitigate the horrors of the strife. No doubt this was the national conviction, and after it had been decided not to join Germany in preventing France from perpetrating a crime, it was absurd to depart from neutrality, in order to help France to escape the logical and just punishment of her own turpitude. The organs of the Tory Opposition, however, rather unpatriotically tried to make political capital out of the policy of the Government by teaching the people that the neutrality of the Cabinet was due to Ministerial cowardice and incapacity.