ABSTRACT
Salisbury’s foreign policy earned the respect of Liberals because its ends were unexceptionable: peace and security. They were less happy with his methods: Gladstonians and some Liberal Unionists did not like the “German alliance” on which his policy was built.1 He had their unease in mind when evading German attempts to lock Britain into their close relationship by getting her to accede to the Triple Alliance, the cornerstone of Bismarck’s European system. Salisbury’s fundamental objection to that step was the unacceptable risk of war with France or Russia, or both. He chose to plead, instead, the unpredictability of the House of Commons and the British electorate as making any such commitment impossible to meet. The excuse was calculated to appeal to the German chancellor’s dislike of parliaments and democracy. The surrender of Heligoland, a British possession since 1815, to Germany in 1890 symbolized Britain’s desire to stand well with Germany, and was not popular with parliament or the public. The Anglo-German territorial agreement, in which the island’s cession was a psychologically important point for the Germans, divided a great tract of East Africa between the two countries. In a speech replete with irony about “partitions of the unknown”, given the little they knew of the African interior, Salisbury said that the agreement had “one solid practical merit…it has removed possible sources of quarrel” with, he did not need to say, the greatest of the European great powers whose growing colonial ambitions were a worrying source of AngloGerman friction. He invited his critics at home to “read between the lines” of this and his other colonial treaties: they were necessary to damp down the “fire of national self-consciousness” stoked by politicians bent on “selfglorification…and…by…fierce leading articles from one capital to another”. Democracy and a popular press were inherently excitable and very dangerous in an era of steadily more destructive and costly armaments.2
