The assurance that we should enjoy the blessings of peace for an indefinite period carried with it no small obligations towards the guarantors of our neutrality. We could not let ourselves be induced to favour any one of them in particular, either through personal bias or through political considerations. The Belgian signatories to the pacts of 1839 fully realized the duties incumbent upon a perpetually neutral State, and their adhesion made it certain that their successors would always fulfil these duties. All Belgians are convinced that none of their ministers since then has failed to keep the engagements to which his loyal predecessors set their hand.[17] More than twenty-five years ago, King Leopold, on the strength of some documents produced by two forgers, Mondion and Nieter, was repeatedly accused by sundry Parisian publicists, whose words carried a certain weight, of having entered into a secret convention with Germany against France. How little these writers knew of our King, and of his real sentiments towards our disconcerting eastern neighbours! Few rulers had a clearer insight than he into the ambitions that they had not yet laid bare. With his marvellous knowledge of men, he had read, as in open book, the erratic and overbearing character of William II. On one of the last occasions that he honoured me with his advice, he warned me to beware, when I went to Germany, of German civilities. As soon as the second King of the Belgians began once more, after a long interval, to visit Paris, the Parisians learnt to know him better; and the charges against his political good faith died down like an untended fire. Was it impracticable for a Belgian sovereign to conclude a secret military convention? We learnt at the beginning of the present war that such a treaty existed between the King of Roumania and the Emperor of Austria, a treaty directed against Russia, and approved, whenever the time came for its renewal, by the Roumanian Prime Minister, whether Liberal or Conservative. When I was acting as representative of the Belgian Government at Bucharest, the existence of this pact was strenuously confirmed or as strenuously denied by several of my colleagues. The Russian minister, M. de Fonton, refused to believe in it; this was the only point on which he disagreed with his friend and ally, M. Arsène Henry, the French envoy. The convention was none the less real for all that, although it did not survive the ordeal of being dragged out from its hiding-place. In signing this futile agreement, King Carol had not overstepped his constitutional rights, as was proved by the counter-signature of the responsible minister. If such freedom of action was allowed to Roumania, why was it denied to Belgium?