While the Japanese Government hesitated, Anglo-French negotiations also reached a crucial moment. The French, caught in a strategic disadvantage, no longer had the confidence to set terms and had to make significant concessions to the British.
Negotiations, favorable towards Britain, should have been reassuring, yet Prime Minister Gladstone now found no cause for jubilation.
"Is it really impossible to recover the situation in the African battlefield?"
"Walk enough night roads," one eventually encounters ghosts. Britannia's years-long policy of balancing power in Europe was showing a deadly flaw and appeared on the brink of collapse.
There was no choice, the once impressive French, who were not as formidable on the battlefield as they boasted, led to the London Government making a strategic misjudgment.
Like it or not, Gladstone had to admit: the once unequaled French Army was no more, and a France without Napoleon had lost its power to dominate the continent.
