It was this gift which frequently made him more the spokesman of the House of Commons than of party in Government counsels. The approval of the House of Commons was, in his opinion, essential to the development of foreign policy, and his views as to the undesirability of unnecessary concealment were strong. While recognizing that everything could not be disclosed, he thought that the House of Commons should be in the Government's confidence as far as possible in diplomatic relations, and he looked on the tendency to surround all official proceedings with secrecy as more worthy of a bureaucrat than a statesman. Bismarck, Dilke said in 1876, was the diplomatist of foreign Europe who was never believed because he told the truth. He had no sympathy with the isolation of Great Britain, which had been a feature of our policy during his early career. But when Lord Beaconsfield would have plunged into a war with Russia in 1878, without an ally or a friend, he opposed that policy as suicidal. Of that policy he said at that time: 'English Radicals of the present day do not bound their sympathies by the Channel ... a Europe without England is as incomplete, and as badly balanced, and as heavily weighted against freedom, as that which I, two years ago, denounced to you--a Europe without France. The time may come when England will have to fight for her existence, but for Heaven's sake let us not commit the folly of plunging into war at a moment when all Europe would be hostile to our armies--not one Power allied to the English cause.' [Footnote: Vol. I., Chapter XVI., p. 239.] The keynote of his policy was friendship with France. His experience in the Franco-German War had for ever changed the friendly impression which led him first to follow the German forces into the field. Germany at war and Germany in a conquered country taught him in 1870-71 a lesson never to be forgotten, and affected his whole attitude to that Great Power. It has been seen how in the eighties he opposed, to the point of contemplated resignation of office, the Governmental tendency to accept German aggression--'to lie down' under it, as he said; and he fought for the retention of the New Guinea Coast and Zanzibar in 1884-85, as later he fought against Lord Salisbury as to the surrender of Heligoland. [Footnote: _Present Position of European Politics_, p. 242.] It was this courage as well as consistency of policy that bound Gambetta to him, and made Bismarck wish that he should be sent to Berlin at a critical moment in 1885 'to have a talk.' [Footnote: _Life of Lord Granville_, vol. ii., p. 439.] Strong men recognize one another. CHAPTER XLIII THE TURNING-POINT JULY, 1885, TO JULY, 1886 [Greek: ou thruon, ou malachaen avemos pote, tus de megistas ae druas ae platanous oide chamai katagein.] [Footnote: It is not the rush or mallow that the wind can lay low, but the largest oaks and plane-trees.] Lucian in "Anthologia." I.