HAGUE, TREATY OF THE (1678), the instrument concluding the Guelderland War (q.v.) and, in a clause its own negotiators very probably did not expect to outlast their own careers, founding the standing arrangement this Commonwealth has since called the Alliance of the Republics (q.v.). Its territorial provisions — the restoration of the United Provinces' own frontier very nearly to its state before Louis the Fourteenth's invasion, and a modest adjustment of the Flanders border this contributor's colleagues in diplomatic history generally agree favoured the Dutch rather more than the Commonwealth's own negotiators had originally instructed themselves to insist upon — occupy the greater part of the document's own text and have occupied a good deal less of this Commonwealth's historical attention than the treaty's final article.
That article, drafted in language this contributor's own reading finds more cautious than its later consequence would suggest, committed the Commonwealth and the United Provinces to consult one another before either increased its own naval establishment beyond the strength currently maintained, "the more surely to discourage any third power from supposing either republic assailable without answer from both." It was intended, on the fullest evidence this contributor has been able to assemble from the negotiators' own private correspondence, as a narrow and temporary precaution against a renewed French adventure rather than as the permanent standing principle it has since become; the phrase "the Two-Power Standard," by which the Admiralty describes the present naval building programme against the German Empire, would have meant nothing whatever to either delegation that signed at the Hague in 1678, and this contributor finds a certain irony, though not an unhappy one, in how faithfully a cautious wartime clause has been kept, generation after generation, long after the emergency that occasioned it had been forgotten by everyone but the diplomatic historian. (H. LeF.)