 CHAPTER XXIII. Wellington belonged so much to the past at the time of his death that it seems hardly in place here to say anything about his character as a soldier, but it may be remarked that his success was due in great measure to a sort of inspired common sense which rose to something like genius. He had in the highest conceivable decree the art of winning victories. In war as in statesmanship he had one characteristic which is said to have been the special gift of Julius Caesar, and for the lack of which Caesar's greatest modern rival in the art of conquest, the First Napoleon, lost all or nearly all that he had won. Wellington not only understood what could be done, but also what could not be done. The wild schemes of almost universal rule which set Napoleon astray and led him to his destruction would have appeared to the strong common sense of the Duke of Wellington as impossible and absurd as they would have looked to the lofty intelligence of Caesar. It can hardly be questioned that an original genius Napoleon far surpassed the Duke of Wellington, but Wellington always knew exactly what he could do, and Napoleon often confounded his ambitions with his capacities. Wellington provided for everything, looked after everything, never trusted to his star or to chance or to anything, but care and preparation and the proper application of means to ends. Under almost any conceivable conditions Wellington, pitted against Napoleon, was the man to win in the end. The very genius of Napoleon would sooner or later have left him open to the unsleeping watchfulness the almost infallible judgment of Wellington. He was as fortunate as he was deserving. No man could have drunk more deeply of the cup of fame and fortune than Wellington, and he was never for one moment intoxicated by it. After all his long wars and his splendid victories, he had some thirty-seven years of peace and glory to enjoy. He held the loftiest position in this country that any man, not a sovereign, could hold, and he ranked far higher in the estimation of his countrymen than most of their sovereigns have done. The rescued emperors and kings of Europe had showered their honors on him. His fame was as completely secure during his lifetime as if death by removing him from the possibility of making a mistake had consecrated it. No new war under altered conditions tried the flexibility and the endurance of the military genius which had defeated in turn all Napoleon's great marshals as a prelude to the defeat of Napoleon himself. If ever any mortal may be said to have had in life all he could have desired, Wellington was surely that man. He might have found a new contentment in his honors if he really cared much about them in the reflection that he had done nothing for himself but all for the State. He did not love war, he had no inclination whatever for it. When Lord John Russell visited Napoleon in Elba, Napoleon asked him whether he thought the Duke of Wellington would be able to live thence forward without the excitement of war. It was probably in Napoleon's mind that the English soldier would be constantly entangling his country in foreign complications for the sake of gratifying his love for the brave squares of war. Lord John Russell endeavored to impress upon the great fallen emperor that the Duke of Wellington would as a matter of course lapse into the place of a simple citizen and would look with no manner of regret to the stormy days of battle. Napoleon seems to have listened with a sort of melancholy incredulity and only observed once or twice that it was a splendid game, war. To Wellington it was no splendid game or game of any sort. It was a stern duty to be done for his sovereign and his country and to be got through as quickly as possible. The difference between the two men cannot be better illustrated. It is impossible to compare to such men. There is hardly any common basis of comparison. To say which is the greater, one must first make up his mind as to whether his standard of greatness is genius or duty. Napoleon has made a far deeper impression on history. If that be superior greatness it would be scarcely possible for any national partiality to claim an equal place for Wellington. But Englishmen may be content with the reflection that their hero saved his country and that Napoleon nearly ruined his. We write this without the slightest inclination to sanction what may be called the British Philistine view of the character of Napoleon. Up to a certain period of his career it seems to us deserving of almost unmingled admiration. Just as his country in her earlier disputes with the other European power seems to have been almost entirely in the right. But his success and his glory were too strong for Napoleon. He fell for the very want of that simple steadfast devotion to duty which inspired Wellington always and which made him seem dignified and great even in statesmanship for which he was unfitted and even when in statesmanship he was acting in a manner that would have made another man seem ridiculous rather than respectable. Wellington more newly resembled Washington than Napoleon. He was a much greater soldier than Washington, but he was not on the whole so great a man. It is fairly to be said for Wellington that the proportions of his personal greatness seem to grow rather than to dwindle as he and his events are removed from us in time. The battle of Waterloo does not indeed stand as one of its historians as described it among the decisive battles of the world. It was fought to keep the bonaparts off the throne of France and in twenty-five years after Waterloo, while the victor of Waterloo is yet living another bonapart was preparing to mount that throne. It was the climax of a national policy which however justifiable and inevitable it may have become in the end would hardly now be justified as to its origin by one intelligent Englishman out of twenty. The present age is not therefore likely to become a rhapsodical over Wellington as our forefathers might have been merely because he defeated the French and crushed Napoleon. Yet it is impossible for the coolest mind to study the career of Wellington without feeling a constant glow of admiration for that singular course of simple antique devotion to duty. His was truly the spirit in which a great nation must desire to be served. The nation was not ungrateful. It heaped honours on Wellington. It would have heaped more on him if it knew how. It gave him its almost unqualified admiration. On his death it tried to give him such a public funeral as Hero never had. The pageant was indeed a splendid and a gorgeous exhibition. It was not perhaps very well suited to the temperament and habits of the cold and simple Hero to whose honour it was got up. Or perhaps our gorgeous pageants exactly the sort of performance in which as a nation England particularly excels. But in the fast, silent, respectful crowd that thronged the London streets, a crowd such as no other city in the world could show, there was better evidence than pageantry or ceremonial could supply of the esteem in which the living generation held the Hero of the last. The name of Wellington had long ceased to represent any hostility of nation to nation. The crowds who filled the streets of London that day had no thought of the kind of sentiment which used to fill the breasts of their fathers when France and Napoleon were named. They honoured Wellington only as one who had always served his country as the soldier of England and not as the invader of France or even as the conqueror of Napoleon. The homage to his memory was as pure of selfish passion as his own career. The new parliament was called together in November. It brought into public life in England a man who afterwards made some mark in our politics and whose intellect and debating power seemed at one time to promise him a position inferior to that of hardly anyone in the House of Commons. This was Mr. Robert Low who had returned from one of the Australian colonies to enter political life in his native country. Mr. Low was a scholar of a highly cultured order and despite some serious defects of delivery he proved to be a debater of the very highest class, especially gifted with the weapons of sarcasm, scorn and invective. He was a liberal in the intellectual sense. He was opposed to all restraints on education and on the progress of a career. But he had a detestation for democratic doctrines which almost amounted to a mania. He despised with the whole force of a temperament, very favourable to intellectual scorn, alike the rural Tory and the town radical. His opinions were generally rather negative than positive. He did not seem to have any very positive opinions of any kind where politics were concerned. He was governed by a detestation of abstractions and sentimentalities and views of all sorts. An intellectual Don Juan of the political world he believed with Molière's hero that two and two make four and that four and four make eight and he was impatient of any theory which would commend itself to the mind on less rigorous evidence. If contempt for the intellectual weaknesses of an opposing party or doctrine could have made a great politician, Mr. Low would have won that name. In politics, however, criticism is not enough. One must be able to originate, to mould the will of others, to compromise, to lead while seeming to follow, often to follow while seeming to lead. Of gifts like these Mr. Low had no share. He never became more than a great parliamentary critic of the accurate and vitriolic style. Just immediately on the assembling of the new parliament Mr. Villers brought forward a resolution not merely pledging the House of Commons to a free trade policy, but pouring out a sort of censure on all who had hitherto failed to recognise its worth. This step was thought necessary and was indeed made necessary by the errors of which Lord Darby had been guilty and the preposterous vapourings of some of his less responsible followers. If the resolution had been passed, the government must have resigned. They were willing enough now to agree on any resolution declaring that free trade was the established policy of the country, but they could not accept the triumphant eulogium which the resolution proposed to offer to the commercial policy of the years when they were the uncompromising enemies of that very policy. They could submit to the punishment imposed on them, but they did not like this public kissing of the rod and doing penance. Lord Palmerston, who even up to that time regarded his ultimate acceptance of office under Lord Darby as a not impossible event, if once the Darby party could shake themselves quite free of protection, devised an amendment which afforded them the means of a more or less honourable retreat. This resolution pledged the House to the policy of unrestricted competition, firmly maintained and prudently extended, but recorded no panage-hurric of the legislation of 1846 and consequent condemnation of those who opposed that legislation. The amendment was accepted by all but the small band of irreconcilable protectionists, 468 voted for it, only 53 against it, and the moan of protection was made. All that long chapter of English legislation was closed. This commercial and other interest did indeed afterwards demerred to the application of the principle of unrestricted competition to their peculiar concerns, but they did not plead for protection. They only contended that the protection they sought for was not in fact protection at all, but free trade under peculiar circumstances. The straightforward doctrine of protection perished of the debate of November 1852. Still the government only existed on sufferance. Their tenure of office was somewhat rudely compared to that of a bailiff put into possession of certain premises, who was liable to be sent away at any moment when the two parties concerned in the litigation choose to come to terms. There was a general expectation that the moment Mr. Disraeli came to set out a genuine financial scheme, the fate of the government would be decided. So the event proved. Mr. Disraeli made a financial statement which showed remarkable capacity for dealing with figures. It was subjected to a far more serious test than his first budget, for that was necessarily a mere stop-gap or makeshift. This was a real budget, altering and reconstructing the financial system and the taxation of the country. The skill with which the Chancellor of the Exchequer explained his measures and tossed his figures about, convinced many even of his strongest opponents that he had the capacity to make a good budget if he only were allowed to do so by the conditions of his party's existence. But his cabinet had come into office under special obligations to the country party and the farmers. They could not avoid making some experiment in the way of special legislation for the farmers. They had at the very least to put on an appearance of doing something for them. The Chancellor of the Exchequer might be supposed to be in the position of the soldier in Hogarth's march to Finchley between the rival claimants on his attention. He has promised and vowed to the one, but he knows that the slightest mark of civility he offers to her will be fiercely resented by the other. When Mr. Disraeli undertook to favour the country interest and the farmers, he must have known only too well that he was setting all the free traders and pelites against him, and he knew at the same time that if he neglected the country party he was cutting the ground from beneath his feet. The principle of his budget was the reduction of the malt duties and the increase of the inhabited house duty. Some manipulations of the income tax were to be introduced, chiefly with a view to lighten the impulse on farmers' profits, and there was to be a modest reduction of the tea duty. The two points that stood out clear and prominent before the House of Commons were the reduction of the malt duty and the increase of the duty on inhabited houses. The reduction of the malt duty, as Mr. Lowe said in his pungent criticism, was the keystone of the budget. That reduction created a deficit which the inhabited house duty had to be doubled in order to supply. The scheme was a complete failure. The farmers did not care much about the concession which had been made in their favour. Those who had to pay for it in double taxation were bitterly indignant. Mr. Disraeli had exasperated the one claimant and not greatly pleased the other. The government soon saw how things were likely to go. The Chancellor of the Exchequer began to see that he had only a desperate fight to make. The Whigs, the Free Traders, the Peelites, and such independent members, or unattached members, as Mr. Lowe and Mr. Bernal Osborne all fell on him. It became a combat à outence. It well suited Mr. Disraeli's peculiar temperament. During the whole of his parliamentary career he has never fought so well as when he has been free to indulge to the full the courage of despair. CHAPTER 24 Mr. Gladstone The debate was one of the finest of its kind ever heard in parliament during our time. The excitement on both sides was intense. The rivalry was hot and eager. Mr. Disraeli was animated by all the power of desperation and was evidently in a mood neither to give nor to take quarter. He assailed Sir Charles Wood, the late Chancellor of the Exchequer, with a vehemence and even of virulence, which certainly added much to the pecancy and interest of the discussion so far as listeners were concerned, but which more than once went to the very verge of the limits of parliamentary decorum. It was in the course of this speech that Disraeli, leaning across the table and directing his words full at Sir Charles Wood declared, I care not to be the right honourable gentleman's critic, but if he has learned his business he has yet to learn that petulance is not sarcasm and that insolence is not invective. The House had not heard the concluding word of Disraeli's bitter and impassioned speech when at two o'clock in the morning Mr. Gladstone leaped to his feet to answer him. Then began that long parliamentary duel which only knew a truce when at the close of the session of 1876 Mr. Disraeli crossed the threshold of the House of Commons for the last time, thenceforward to take his place among the peers as Lord Beckinsfield. During all the intervening four and twenty years these two men were rivals in power and in parliamentary debate as much as ever pit and fox had been. Their opposition like that of pit and fox was one of temperament and character as well as of genius, position and political opinion. The rivalry of this first heated and eventful night was a splendid display. Those who had thought it impossible that any impression could be made upon the House after the speech of Mr. Disraeli had to acknowledge that a yet greater impression was produced by the unprepared reply of Mr. Gladstone. The House divided about four o'clock in the morning and the government were left in a minority of nineteen. Mr. Disraeli took the defeat with his characteristic composure. The morning was cold and wet. It will be an unpleasant day for going to Osborn he quietly remarked to a friend as they went down Westminster Hall together and looked out into the dreary streets. That day at Osborn the resignation of the ministry was formally placed in the hands of the Queen. In a few days after the coalition ministry was formed, Lord Aberdeen was Prime Minister, Lord John Russell took the Foreign Office, Lord Palmerston became Home Secretary. Mr. Gladstone was Chancellor of the Exchequer. The public were a good deal surprised that Lord Palmerston had taken such a place as that of Home Secretary. His name had been identified with the Foreign Policy of England and it was not supposed that he felt the slightest interest in the ordinary business of the Home Department. Palmerston himself explained in a letter to his brother that the Home Office was his own choice. He was not anxious to join the ministry at all, and if he had to make one he preferred that he should have some office in which he had personally no traditions. I had long settled in my own mind, he said, that I would not go back to the Foreign Office and that if I ever took any office it would be the Home. It does not do for a man to pass his whole life in one Department and the Home Office deals with the concerns of the country internally and brings one in contact with one's fellow countrymen, besides which it gives one more influence in regard to the militia and the defences of the country. Lord Palmerston in fact announces that he has undertaken the business of the Home Office for the same reason as that given by Fritz in the Grand Duchesse for becoming a schoolmaster. Can you teach, asks the Grand Duchesse. No is the answer, c'est pour apprendre, I go to learn. The reader may well suspect, however, that it was not only with a view of learning the business of the internal administration and becoming acquainted with his fellow countrymen, that Palmerston preferred the Home Office. He would not consent to be Foreign Secretary on any terms but his own, and these terms were then out of the question. The principal interest felt in the new government was not, however, centred in Lord Palmerston. The new Chancellor of the Exchequer was the man upon whom the eyes of curiosity and interest were chiefly turned. Mr. Gladston was still a young man in the Parliamentary sense, at least, he was but forty-three. His career had been in every way remarkable. He had entered public life at a very early age. He had been, to quote the words of Macaulay, a distinguished debater in the House of Commons ever since he was one and twenty. Criticizing his book, The State, in its Relations with the Church, which was published in 1838, Macaulay speaks of Gladston as, A young man of unblemished character and of distinguished parliamentary talents, the rising hope of those stern and unbending Tories who follow reluctantly and mutinously a leader whose experience is indispensable to them but whose cautious temper and moderate opinions they abhor. The time was not so far away when the stern and unbending Tories would regard Gladston as the greatest hope of their most bitter enemies. Lord Macaulay goes on to overwhelm the views expressed by Mr. Gladston as to the relations between state and church with a weight of argument and gorgeousness of illustration that now seems to have been hardly called for. One of the doctrines of the young statesman which Macaulay confutes with a special warmth is the principle which, as he states it, would give the Irish a Protestant church whether they like it or not. The author of the book which contained this doctrine was the author of the disestablishment of the state church in Ireland. Mr. Gladston was by birth a Lancashire man. It is not unworthy of notice that Lancashire gave to the parliaments of recent times their three greatest orators, Mr. Gladston, Mr. Bright and the late Lord Darby. Mr. Gladston was born in Liverpool and was the son of Sir John Gladston Escochman who founded a great house in the seaport of the Mersey. He entered parliament when very young as a protege of the Newcastle family and he soon faithfully attached himself to Sir Robert Peale. His knowledge of finance, his thorough appreciation of the various needs of the nation's commerce and business, his middle class origin, all brought him into natural affinity with his great leader. He became a free trader with Peale. He was not in the House of Commons, oddly enough, during the session when the free trade battle was fought and won. It has already been explained in this history that as he had changed his opinions with his leader he felt a reluctance to ask the support of the Newcastle family for the borough which by virtue of their influence he had previously represented. But except for that short interval his whole career may be pronounced one long parliamentary success. He was from the very first recognized as a brilliant debater, as one who promised to be an orator, but it was not until after the death of Sir Robert Peale that he proved himself the master of parliamentary eloquence we all now know him to be. It was he who pronounced what may be called the funeral oration upon Peale in the House of Commons, but the speech, although undoubtedly inspired by the truest and the deepest feelings, does not seem by any means equal to some of his more recent efforts. There is an appearance of elaboration about it which goes far to Marit's effect. Perhaps the first really great speech made by Gladstone was the reply to Disraeli on the memorable December morning which we have just described. That speech put him in the very foremost rank of English orators. Then perhaps he first showed to the full the one great quality in which as a parliamentary orator he has never had a rival in our time, the readiness which seems to require no preparation, but can marshal all its arguments as if by instinct at a given moment, and the fluency which can pour out the most eloquent language as freely as though it were but the breath of the nostrils. When shortly after the formation of the Coalition Ministry, Mr. Gladstone delivered his first budget, it was regarded as a positive curiosity of financial exposition. It was a performance that belonged to the Department of the Fine Arts. The speech occupied several hours, and assuredly no listener wished it the shorter by a single sentence. Pit we read had the same art of making a budget speech a fascinating discourse, but in our time no minister has had this gift except Mr. Gladstone. Each time that he essayed the same task subsequently, he accomplished just the same success. Mr. Gladstone's first oratorical qualification was his exquisite voice. Such a voice would make commonplace seem interesting, and lend something of a fascination to dullness itself. It was singularly pure, clear, resonant, and sweet. The orator never seemed to use the slightest effort or strain in filling any hall and reaching the ear of the farthest among the audience. It was not a loud voice or of great volume, but strong, vibrating, and silvery. The words were always aided by energetic action and by the deep gleaming eyes of the orator. Somebody once said that Gladstone was the only man in the house who could talk in italics. The saying was odd, but was nevertheless appropriate and expressive. Gladstone could, by the slightest modulation of his voice, give all the emphasis of italics, of small print, of large print, or any other effect he might desire to his spoken words. It is not to be denied that his wonderful gift of words sometimes let him astray. It was often such a fluency as that of a torrent on which the orator was carried away. Gladstone had to pay for his fluency by being too fluent. He could seldom resist the temptation to shower too many words on his subject and his hearers. Sometimes he involved his sentence in parenthesis with in parenthesis until the ordinary listener began to think explication in impossibility, but the orator never failed to unravel all the entanglements and to bring the passage out to a clear and legitimate conclusion. There was never any halt or incoherency, nor did the joints of the sentence fail to fit together in the right way. Gleely once described a famous speech as a circumgeration of incoherent words. This description certainly could not be applied even to Mr. Gladstone's most involved passages, but if some of those were described as a circumgeration of coherent words the phrase might be considered germane to the matter. His style was commonly too redundant. It seemed as if it belonged to a certain school of exuberant Italian rhetoric, yet it was hardly to be called florid. Gladstone indulged in few flowers of rhetoric and his great gift was not imagination. His fault was simply the habitual use of too many words. This defect was indeed a characteristic of the Peelite School of eloquence. Mr. Gladstone retained some of the defects of the school in which he had been trained even after he had come to surpass its greatest master. Then however this superb exuberant rush of words added indescribable strength to the eloquence of the speaker. In passages of indignant remonstrance or denunciation, when word followed word and stroke came down upon stroke with a wealth of resource that seemed inexhaustible, the very fluency and variety of the speaker overwhelmed his audience. Interruption only gave him a new stimulus and appeared to supply him with fresh resources of argument and illustration. His retorts leaped to his lips, his eye caught sometimes even the mere gesture that indicated dissent or question, and perhaps some unlucky opponent who was only thinking of what might be said in opposition to the great order, found himself suddenly dragged into the conflict and overwhelmed with a torrent of remonstrance, argument and scornful words. Man had not much humor of the playful kind, but he had a certain force of sarcastic and scornful rhetoric. He was always terribly in earnest. Whether the subjects were great or small, he threw his whole soul into it. Once in addressing a schoolboy gathering he told his young listeners that if a boy ran he ought always to run as fast as he could. If he jumped, he ought always to jump as far as he could. He illustrated his maxim in his own career. He had no idea, apparently, of running or jumping in such measure as happened to please the fancy of the moment. He always exercised his splendid powers to the uttermost strain. A distinguished critic once pronounced Mr. Gladston to be the greatest parliamentary orator of our time, on the ground that he made by far the greatest number of fine speeches, while admitting that two or three speeches had been made by other men of the day, which might rank higher than any of his. This is, however, a principle of criticism which posterity never sanctions. The greatest speech, the greatest poem, give the author the highest place, though the effort were but single. Shakespeare would rank beyond Massinger just as he does now had he written only the tempest. We cannot say how many novels as good as Gioblas would make the sage the equal of Cervantes. On this point fame is inexorable. We are not, therefore, inclined to call Mr. Gladston the greatest English orator of our time, when we remember some of the finest speeches of Mr. Bright. But did we regard parliamentary speaking as a mere instrument of parliamentary business and debate, then unquestionably Mr. Gladston is not only the greatest, but by far the greatest English orator of our time. For he had a richer combination of gifts than any other man we can remember and he could use them oftenest with effect. He was like a racer which cannot indeed always go faster than every rival but can win more races in the year than any other horse. Mr. Gladston could get up at any moment and no matter how many times a night in the House of Commons and be argumentative or indignant, pour out a stream of impassioned eloquence or a shower of figures just as the exigency of the debate in the moment required. He was not, of course, always equal, but he was always eloquent and effective. He seemed as if he could not be anything but eloquent. Perhaps judged in this way he never had an equal in the English Parliament. Neither Pitt nor Fox ever made so many speeches, combining so many great qualities. Chatham was a great actor rather than a great orator. Burke was the greatest political essayist who ever addressed the House of Commons. Canning did not often rise above the level of burnished rhetorical commonplace. Macaulay, who during his time drew the most crowded houses of any speaker, not even accepting Peele, was not an orator in the true sense. Probably no one, past or present, had in combination so many gifts of voice, manner, fluency and argument, style, reason and passion as Mr. Gladston. The House of Commons was his ground. There he was himself. There he was always seen to the best advantage. As a rule he was not so successful on the platform. His turn of mind did not fit him well for the work of addressing great public meetings. He loved to look too carefully at every side of a question and did not always go so quickly to the heart of it as would suit great popular audiences. The principal defect of his mind was probably a lack of simplicity, a tendency to over-refining and super-subtle argument. Not perhaps unnaturally, however, when he did, during some of the later passages of his career, lay himself out for the work of addressing popular audiences, he threw away all discrimination and gave loose to the full force with which, under the excitement of great pressure, he was won't to rush at a principal. There seemed a certain lack of balance in his mind. A want of the exact poise of all his faculties. Either he must refine too much, or he did not refine at all. Thus he became accused and with some reason of over-refining, and all but quibbling, in some of his parliamentary arguments, of looking at all sides of a question so carefully that it was too long in doubt whether he was ever going to form any opinion of his own, he was sometimes accused with equal justice of pleading one side of a political cause before great meetings of his countrymen with all the passionate blindness of a partisan. The accusations might seem self-contradictory if we did not remember that they will apply, and with great force and justice, to Burke. Burke cut blocks with a razor and went on refining to an impatient house of commons only eager for its dinner, and the same Burke threw himself into antagonism to the French Revolution as if he were the wildest of partisans, as if the question had but one side and only fools or villains could possibly say it had any other. Mr. Gladstone grew slowly into liberal convictions. At the time when he joined the coalition ministry, he was still regarded as one who had scarcely left the camp of Toreism, and who had only joined that ministry because it was a coalition. Years after, he was applied to by the late Lord Darby to join a ministry formed by him, and it was not supposed that there was anything unreasonable in the proposition. The first impulse toward liberal principles was given to his mind probably by his change with his leader from protection to free trade. When a man like Gladstone saw that his traditional principles and those of his party had broken down in any one direction, it was but natural that he should begin to question their endurance in other directions. The whole fabric of belief was built up together. Gladstone's was a mind of that order that sees a principle in everything and must, to adopt the phrase of a great preacher, make the plowing as much a part of religious duty as the praying. The interests of religion seemed to him bound up with the creed of conservatism. The principles of protection must probably at one time have seemed a part of the whole creed of which one article was as sacred as another. His intellect and his principles, however, found themselves compelled to follow the guidance of his leader in the matter of free trade, and when inquiry thus began it was not very likely soon to stop. He must have seen how much the working of such a principle as that of protection became a class interest in England, and how impossible it would have been for it to continue long in existence under an extended and a popular suffrage. In other countries the fallacy of protection did not show itself so glaringly in the eyes of the poorer classes. For in other countries it was not the staple food of the population that became the principle object of a protective duty. But in England the bread on which the poorest had to live was made to pay a tax for the benefit of landlords and farmers. As long as one believed this to be a necessary condition of a great unquestionable creed it was easy for a young statesman to reconcile himself to it. It might bear cruelly on individuals or even multitudes, but so would the law of gravitation, as Mill has remarked, bear harshly on the best of men when it dashed him down from a height and broke his bones. It would be idle to question the existence of the law on that account or to disbelieve the whole teaching of the physical science which explains its movements. But when Mr. Glad said and came to be convinced that there was no such law as the protection principle at all, that it was a mere sham, that to believe in it was to be guilty of an economic heresy, that it was impossible for him not to begin questioning the genuineness of the whole system of political thought of which it formed but a part. Perhaps too he was impelled toward liberal principles at home by seeing what the effects of opposite doctrines had been abroad. He rendered memorable service to the liberal cause of Europe by his eloquent protest against the brutal treatment of Baron Poedio and other liberals of Naples who were imprisoned by the Neapolitan King, a protest which Gadivaldi declared to have sounded the first trumpet call of Italian liberty. In rendering service to liberalism and to Europe, he rendered service also to his own intelligence. He helped to set free his own spirit as well as the Neapolitan people. We find him as his career goes on dropping the traditions of his youth, always rising higher in liberalism and not going back. One of the foremost of his compiers and his only actual rival in popular eloquence eulogized him as always struggling toward the light. The common taunts addressed to public men who have changed their opinions were hardly ever applied to him. Even his enemies felt that the one idea always inspired him, a conscientious anxiety to do the right thing. None accused him of being one of the politicians who mistake as Victor Hugo says a weather cock for a flag, with many qualities which seemed hardly suited to a practical politician, with a sensitive and eager temper like that of Canning, and a turn for a theological argument that as a rural Englishman do not love an estatesman, with an impetuosity that often carried him far astray, and with a deficiency of those genial social qualities that go so far to make a public success in England, Mr. Gladston maintained, through the whole of his career, a reputation against which there was hardly a serious capital. The worst thing that was said of him was that he was too impulsive and that his intelligence was too restless. He was an essayist, a critic, a Homeric scholar, a dilettante in art, music, and old China. He was a theological controversialist. He was a political economist, a financier, a practical administrator whose gift of mastering details has hardly ever been equaled. He was a estatesman and an orator. No man could attempt so many things and not occasionally make himself the subject of a sneer. The intense gravity and earnestness of Gladston's mind always, however, saved him from the special penalty of such versatility. No satirist described him as not one, but all mankind's epitome. As yet, however, he is only the young estatesman who was the other day the hope of the more solemn and solid conservatives, in whom they have not even yet entirely ceased to put some faith. The coalition ministry was so formed that it was not supposed a man necessarily nailed his colors to any mast when he joined it. More than one of Gladston's earliest friends and political associates had a part in it. The ministry might undoubtedly be called an administration of all the talents. Except the late Lord Darby and Mr. Disraeli, it included almost every man of real ability who belonged to either of the two great parties of the state. The Manchester School had, of course, no place there, but they were not likely just yet to be recognized as constituting one of the elements out of which even a coalition ministry might be composed. CHAPTER 25 THE EASTERN QUESTION PART I For forty years England had been at peace. There had indeed been little wars here and there with some of her Asiatic and African neighbors, and once or twice as in the instance of the quarrel between Turkey and Egypt she had been menaced for a moment with the dispute of a more formidable kind and nearer home. But the trouble had passed away, and from Waterloo downward England had known no real war. The new generation was growing up in a kind of happy belief that wars were things of the past for us, out of fashion, belonging to a ruder and less rational society, like the wearing of armor and the carrying of weapons in the civil streets. It is not surprising, if it seemed possible to many, that the England of the future might regard the instruments and the ways of war with the same curious wonder as that which Virgil assumes would one day fill the minds of the rustic laborers whose plows turned up on some field of ancient battle the rusted swords and battered helmets of forgotten warriors. During all the convulsions of the continent England had remained undisturbed. When bloody revolutions were storming through other capitals London was smiling over the dispersion of the Chartists by a few special constables. When the armies of Austria, of Russia, of France, of Sardinia were scattered over vast and various continental battlegrounds our troops were passing in peaceful pageantry of review before the well- pleased eyes of their sovereign in some stately royal park. A new school, as well as a new generation, had sprung up. This school, full of faith but full of practical shrewd logic as well, was teaching with great eloquence and effect that the practice of settling international controversy by the sword was costly, barbarous, and blundering as well as wicked. The practice of the duel in England had utterly gone out. Battle was forever out of fashion as a means of settling private controversy in England. Why then should it be unreasonable to believe that the like practice among nations might soon become equally obsolete? Such certainty was the faith of a great many intelligent persons at the time when the coalition ministry was formed. The majority tacitly acquiesced in the belief without thinking much about it. They had never in their time seen England engaged in European war, and it was natural to assume that what they had never seen they were never likely to see. Anyone who retraces attentively the history of English public opinion at that time will easily find evidence enough of a commonly accepted understanding that England had done with great wars. Even then perhaps a shrewd observer might have been inclined to conjecture that by the very force of reaction a change would soon set in. Man, said Lord Palmerston, is by nature a fighting and quarreling animal. This was one of those smart saucy generalizations characteristic of its author and which used to provoke many graver and more philosophic persons, but which nevertheless often got at the heart of a question in a rough and ready sort of way. In the season of which we are now speaking it was not however the common belief that man was by nature a fighting and a quarreling animal, at least in England. Bad government, the arbitrary power of an aristocracy, the necessity of finding occupation for a standing army, the ambitions of princes, the misguiding lessons of romance and poetry, these and other influences had converted man into an instrument of war. Give him to his own impulses, his own nature, his own ideas of self-interest, and the better teachings of wiser guides, and he is sure to remain in the paths of peace. Such was the common belief of the year or two after the Great Exhibition. The belief fervently preached by a few and accepted without contradiction by the majority, as most common beliefs are. The belief floating in the air of the time and becoming part of the atmosphere in which the generation was brought up. Suddenly, all this happy quiet faith was disturbed, and the long peace which the hero of Tennyson's mod says he thought no peace was over and done. The hero of mod had, it will be observed, the advantage of explaining his convictions after the war had broken out. The name was indeed legion of those who under the same conditions discovered like him that they had never relished the long, long peace, or believed in it much as a peace at all. The Eastern question it was that disturbed the dream of peace. The use of such phrases as the Eastern question, borrowed chiefly from the political vocabulary of France, is not in general to be commended, but we can in this instance find no more ready and convenient way of expressing clearly and precisely the meaning of the crisis which had arisen in Europe. It was strictly the Eastern question, the question of what to do with the east of Europe. It was certain that things could not remain as they then were, and nothing else was certain. The Ottoman power had been settled during many centuries in the southeast of Europe. It had come in there as a conqueror, and had remained there only as a conqueror occupies the ground his tents are covering. The Turk had many of the strong qualities and even the virtues of a great war-like conqueror, but he had no capacity or care for the arts of peace. He never thought of assimilating himself to those whom he had conquered or them to him. He disdained to learn anything from them. He did not care whether or know they learned anything from him. It has been well remarked that of all the races who conquered Greeks, the Turks alone learned nothing from their gifted captives. Captive Greece conquered all the world, except the Turks. They defied her. She could not teach them letters or arts, commerce or science. The Turks were not as a rule oppressive to the races that lived under them. They were not habitual persecutors of the faiths they deemed heretical. In this respect they often contrasted favorably with states that ought to have been able to show them a better example. In truth, the Turk for the most part was disposed to look with disdainful composure on what he considered the religious follies of the heretical races who did not believe in the prophet. They were objects of his scornful pity rather than of his anger. Every now and then, indeed, some sudden fears outburst the fanatical cruelty toward some of the subject's sex horrified Europe and reminded her that the conqueror who had settled herself down in her southeastern corner was still a barbarian who had no right or place in civilized life. But as a rule the Turk did not care enough about the races he ruled over to fuel the impulses of the perverted fanaticism which would strive to scourge men into the faith itself believes needful to salvation. At one time there can be little doubt that all the powers of civilized Europe would gladly have seen the Turk driven out of our continent. But the Turk was powerful for a long series of generations, and it seemed for a while rather a question whether he would not send the Europeans out of their own grounds. He was for centuries the great terror the nightmare of Western Europe. When he began to decay, and when his aggressive strength was practically all gone, it might have been thought that the Western powers would then have managed somehow to get rid of him. But in the meantime the condition of Europe had greatly changed. No one not actually subject to the Turk was afraid of him anymore, and other states had arisen strong for aggression. The uncertainties of these states, as to the intentions of their neighbors and each other, proved a better bulwark for the Turks than any warlike strength of their own could any longer have furnished. The growth of the great Russian Empire was of itself enough to change the whole conditions of the problem. Nothing in our times has been more remarkable than the sudden growth of Russia. The rise of the United States is not so wonderful for the men who made the United States were civilized men, men of our own race, who might be expected to make a way for themselves anywhere, and who were moreover put by destiny in possession of a fast and splendid continent, having all variety of climate and a limitless productiveness and where they had no neighbors or arrivals to molest them. But Russia was peopled by a race who even down to our own times remained in many respects little better than semi-barbarous, and she had enemies and obstacles on all sides. A few generations ago Russia was literally an inland state. She was shut up in the heart of Eastern Europe as if in a prison. The genius, the craft and the audacity of Peter the Great first broke the narrow bounds set to Russia of his day and extended her frontier to the sea. He was followed after a reign or two by a woman of genius, daring, unscrupulousness and proflicacy equal to his own, the greatest woman probably who ever sat on the throne, Elizabeth of England, not even accepted. Catherine II so ably followed the example of Peter the Great that she extended the Russian frontier in directions which he had not had the opportunity to stretch to. By the time her reign was done, Russia was one of the great powers of Europe entitled to enter into negotiations on a footing of equality with the proudest states of the continent. Unlike Turkey, Russia had always showed a yearning after the latest developments of science and of civilization. There was something even of affectation, provoking the smiles of an older and more ingrained culture in the efforts persistently made by Russia to put on the garments of Western civilization. Catherine the Great, in a special, had set the example in this way. She invited Diderot to her court. She adorned her cabinet with a bust of Charles James Fox, while some of the personal habits of herself and of those who surrounded her at court would have seemed too rude and coarse for Eskimo, and while she was putting down free opinion at home with the severity were the only of some medieval Asiatic potentate, she was always talking as though she were a disciple of Rousseau's ideas and a pupil of Chesterfield in manners. This may have seemed ridiculous enough sometimes, and even in our own days the contrast between the professions and the practices of Russia is a familiar subject of satire, but in nations at least the homage which imitation pays often wins for half-conscious hypocrisy as much success as earnest and sincere endeavor. A nation that tries to appear more civilized than it really is ends very often by becoming more civilized than its neighbors ever thought it likely to be. The wars against Napoleon brought Russia into close alliance with England, Austria, Prussia, and other European states of old and advanced civilization. Russia was, during one part of that great struggle, the leading spirit of the alliance against Napoleon. Her soldiers were seen in Italy and in France as well as in the east of Europe. The semi-savage state became, in the eyes of Europe, a power charged along with others with the protection of the conservative interests of the continent. She was recognized as a valuable friend and a most formidable enemy. Gradually it became evident that she could be aggressive as well as conservative. In the war between Austria and Hungary, Russia intervened and conquered Austria's rebellious Hungarians for her. Russia had already earned the hatred of European Liberals by her share in the partition of Poland and her manner of dealing with the Poles. After a while it grew to be a fixed conviction in the mind of the liberalism of Western Europe that Russia was the greatest obstacle then existing in civilization to the spread of popular ideas. The Turk was comparatively harmless in that sense. He was well content now, so much as his ancient ambition shrunk and his ancient war spirit gone out, if his strong and restless neighbors would only let him alone. But he was brought at more than one point into a special collision with Russia. Many of the provinces he ruled over in European Turkey were of Sclavonian race and of the religion of the Greek Church. They were thus affined by a double tie to the Russian people, and therefore the manner in which Turkey dealt with those provinces was a constant source of dispute between Russia and her. The Russians are a profoundly religious people. No matter what one may think of their form of faith, no matter how he may sometimes observe that religious profession contrasts with the daily habits of life, yet he cannot but see that the Russian character is steeped in religious faith or fanaticism. To the Russian fanatic there was something intolerable in the thought of a Sclav population professing the religion of the Orthodox Church being persecuted by the Turks. No Russian ruler could hope to be popular who ventured to show a disregard for the national sentiment on this subject. The Christian populations of Turkey were to the Russian sovereigns with the Germans of Schleswig-Holstein were to the great German princes of later years, an indirect charge to which they could not, if they would, profess any indifference. A German prince, in order to be popular, had to proclaim himself enthusiastic about the cause of Schleswig-Holstein. A Russian emperor could not be loved if he did not declare his undying resolve to be the protector of the Christian populations of Turkey. Much of this was probably sincere and single-minded on the part of the Russian people and most of the Russian politicians, but the other states of Europe began to suspect that mingled up with benign ideas of protecting the Christian populations of Turkey might be a desire to extend the frontier of Russia to the southward and in new direction. Europe had seen by what craft and what audacious enterprises Russia had managed to extend her empire to the sea in other quarters. It began to be commonly believed that her next object of ambition would be the possession of Constantinople and the Bosphorus. It was reported that a will of Peter the Great had left it as an injunction to his successors to turn all the efforts of their policy toward that object. The particular document, which was believed to be a will of Peter the Great, enjoined on all succeeding Russian sovereigns never to relax in the extension of their territory northward on the Baltic and southward on the Black Sea shores, and to encroach as far as possible in the direction of Constantinople and the Indies. To work out this, raise wars continually, at one time against Turkey, at another against Persia, make dockyards on the Black Sea. By degrees make yourselves masters of that sea as well as of the Baltic, hasten the decay of Persia and penetrate to the Persian Gulf, establish if possible the ancient commerce of the East Viasiria, and push on to the Indies which are the Entrepot of the world. Once there you need not fear the gold of England. We now know that the alleged will was not genuine, but there could be little doubt that the policy of Peter and of his great follower Catherine would have been in thorough harmony with such a project. It therefore seemed to be the natural business of other European powers to see that the defects of the Ottoman government such as they were should not be made an excuse for helping Russia to secure the objects of her special ambition. One great power above all the rest had an interest in watching over every movement that threatened in any way to interfere with the highway to India, still more with her peaceful and secure possession of India itself. That power, of course, was England. England, Russia, and Turkey were alike in one respect. They were all Asiatic as well as European powers. But Turkey could never come into any manner of collision with the interests of England and the East. The days of Turkey's interfering with any great state were long over. Neither Russia nor England nor any other power in Europe or Asia feared her any more. On the contrary, there seemed something like a natural antagonism between England and Russia in the East. The Russians were extending their frontier toward that of our Indian Empire. They were showing in that quarter the same mixture of craft and audacity which had stood them in good stead in various parts of Europe. Our officers and diplomatic emissaries reported that they were continually confronted by the evidences of Russian intrigue in Central Asia. We have already seen how much influenced the real or supposed intrigues of Russia had in directing our policy in Afghanistan. Doubtless there was some exaggeration and some panic in all the tales that were told of Russian intrigue. Sometimes the alarm spread by these tales conjured up a kind of Russian hobgoblin bewildering the minds of public servants and making even statesmen occasionally seem like affrighted children. The question that at present concerns us is not whether all the apprehensions of danger from Russia were just and reasonable, but whether as a matter of fact they did exist. They certainly counted for a great deal in determining the attitude of the English people toward both Turkey and Russia. It was in great measure out of these alarms that there grew up among certain statesmen in classes in this country the conviction that the maintenance of the integrity of the Turkish Empire was part of the national duty of England. It is not too much therefore to say that the states of Europe generally desired the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire simply because it was believed that while Turkey held her place she was a barrier against vague dangers which it was not worth while encountering as long as they could possibly be averted. Sharply defined the condition of things was this. Russia, by reason of her sympathy of religion or race with Turkey's Christian populations, was brought into chronic antagonism with Turkey. England, by reason of her Asiatic possessions, was kept in just the same state of antagonism to Russia. The position of England was trying and difficult. She felt herself compelled by the seeming necessity of her national interests to maintain the existence of a power which on its own merits stood condemned and for which as a power no English statesmen ever cared to say a word. The position of Russia had more plausibility about it. It sounded better when described in an official document or a popular appeal. Russia was the religious state which it made at her mission and her duty to protect the suffering Christians of Turkey. England, let her state her case no matter how carefully or frankly, could only affirm that her motive in opposing Russia was the protection of her own interests. Unconvenient result of this condition of things was that here among English people there was always a wide difference of opinion as to the national policy with regard to Russia and Turkey. Many public men of great ability and influence were of opinion that England had no right to uphold the Ottoman power because of any fancy danger that might come to us from its fall. It was the simple duty of England they insisted to be just and fear not. In private life they contended, we should all abhor a man who assisted a Ruffian to live in a house which he had only got into as a burglar merely because there was a chance that the dispossession of the Ruffian might enable his patron's rival and business to become the owner of the premises. The duty they insisted of a conscientious man is clear. He must not patronize a Ruffian, whatever comes. Let what will happen, that he must not do. So it was according to their argument with national policy. We are not concerned in discussing this question just now. We are merely acknowledging a fact which came to be of material consequence when the crisis arose that threw England into sudden antagonism with Russia. End of Section 17. Section 18 of A History of Our Own Times, Vol. 2 by Justin McCarthy. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Pamela Nagami. Chapter 25 The Eastern Question, Part II That crisis came about during the later years of the reign of Emperor Nicholas. He saw its opening, but not the close of even its first volume. Nicholas was a man of remarkable character. He had many of the ways of an Asiatic despot. He had a strong ambition of fierce and fitful temper, a daring but sometimes too a vacillating will. He had many magnanimous and noble qualities and moods of sweetness and gentleness. He reminded people sometimes of an Alexander the Great, sometimes of the Arabian knight's version of Haruna Rashid. A certain excitability ran through the temperament of all his house which in some of its members broke into actual madness, and in others prevailed no farther than to lead to wild outbreaks of temper such as those that often convulsed the frame and distorted the character of a Charles LeBold or a Cœur de Lyon. We cannot date the ways and characters of Nicholas's family from the years of Peter the Great. We must, for tolerably obvious reasons, be content to deduce their origin from the reign of Catherine II. The extraordinary and almost unparalleled conditions of the early married life of that much-injured, much-injuring woman would easily account for any aberrations of intellect and will among her immediate descendants. Her son was a madman. There was madness or something very like it among the brothers of the Emperor Nicholas. The Emperor at one time was very popular in England. He had visited the Queen, and he had impressed everyone with his noble presence, his lofty stature, his singular personal beauty, his blended dignity and familiarity of manner. He talked as if he had no higher ambition than to be in friendly alliance with England. When he wished to convey his impression of the highest degree of personal loyalty and honour, he always spoke of the word of an English gentleman. There can indeed be little doubt that the Emperor was sincerely anxious to keep on terms of cordial friendship with England, and what is more, had no idea, until the very last, that the way he was walking was one which England could not consent to tread. His brother and predecessor had been in close alliance with England. His own ideal hero was the Duke of Wellington. He had made up his mind that when the division of the spoils of Turkey came about, England and he could best consult for their own interests and the peace of the world by making the appropriation a matter of joint arrangement. We do not often in history find a great despot explaining in advance, and in frank words, a general policy like that which the Emperor Nicholas cherished with regard to Turkey. We are usually left to infer his schemes from his acts. Not uncommonly we have to set his acts and the fair inferences from them against his own positive and repeated assurances. But in the case of the Emperor Nicholas we are left in no such doubt. He told England exactly what he proposed to do. He told the story twice over. More than that he consigned it to writing for our clearer understanding. When he visited England in 1844 for the second time Nicholas had several conversations with the Duke of Wellington and with Lord Aberdeen, then Foreign Secretary, about Turkey and her prospects and what would be likely to happen in the case of her dissolution, which he believed to be imminent. When he returned to Russia he had a memorandum drawn up by Count Nesselroda, his secretary, embodying the views which according to Nicholas's impressions were entertained alike by him and by the British statesman with whom he had been conversing. Mr. King Lake says that he sent this document to England with the view of covering his retreat, having met with no encouragement from the English statesman. Our idea of the matter is different. It may be taken for granted that the English statesman did not give Nicholas any encouragement, or at least that they did not intend to do so, but it seems clear to us that he believed they had done so. The memorandum drawn up by Count Nesselroda is much more like a formal reminder or record of a general and oral engagement than a withdrawal from a proposal which was evidently not likely to be accepted. The memorandum set forth that Russia and England were alike penetrated by the conviction that it was for their common interest that the Ottoman Empire should maintain itself in its existing independence and extent of territory, and that they had an equal interest in averting all the dangers that might place its safety in jeopardy. With this object the memorandum declared the essential point was to suffer the port to live in repose without needlessly disturbing it by diplomatic bickering. Turkey, however, had a habit of constantly breaking her engagements, and the memorandum insisted strongly that while she kept up this practice it was impossible for her integrity to be secure, and this practice of hers was indulged in because she believed she might do so with impunity, reckoning on the mutual jealousies of the cabinets and thinking that if she failed in her engagements toward one of them the rest would espouse her cause. As soon as the port shall perceive that it is not supported by the other cabinets, it will give way, and the differences which have arisen will be arranged in a conciliatory manner without any conflict resulting from them. The memorandum spoke of the imperative necessity of Turkey being led to treat her Christian subjects with toleration and mildness. On such conditions it was laid down that England and Russia must alike desire her preservation. But the document proceeded to say that nevertheless these states could not conceal from themselves the fact that the Ottoman Empire contained within itself many elements of dissolution and that unforeseen events might at any time hasten its fall. In the uncertainty which hovers over the future a single fundamental idea seems to admit of a really practical application, that is, that the danger which may result from a catastrophe in Turkey will be much diminished if in the event of its occurring Russia and England have come to an understanding as to the course to be taken by them in common. That understanding will be the more beneficial than as much as it will have the full assent of Austria between whom and Russia there already exists an entire accord. This document was sent to London and kept in the archives of the Foreign Office. It was only produced and made public when, at a much later day, the Russian press began to insist that the English government had always been in possession of the views of Russia in regard to Turkey. It seems to us evident that the Emperor of Russia really believed that his views were shared by English statesmen. The mere fact that his memorandum was received and retained in the English Foreign Office might well of itself tend to make Nicholas assume that its principles were recognized by the English government as the basis of a common action, or at least a common understanding between England and Russia. Nothing is more easy than to allow a fanatic or a man of one idea to suppose that those to whom he explains his views are convinced by him and in agreement with him. It is only necessary to listen and say nothing. Therefore it is to be regretted that the English statesmen should have listened to Nicholas without saying something very distinct to show that they were not admitting or accepting any combination of purpose, or that they should have received his memorandum without some distinct disclaimer of their being in any way bound by its terms. Some of the statements in the memorandum were at the least sufficiently remarkable to have called for comment of some kind from the English statesmen who received it. For example, the Emperor of Russia professed to have in his hands not alone the policy of Russia but that of Austria as well. He spoke for Austria, and he stated that he understood himself to be speaking for England too. Accordingly, England, Austria, and Russia were in his understanding entering into a secret conspiracy among themselves for the disposal of the territory of a friendly power in the event of that power getting into difficulties. This might surely be thought by the English statesmen to bear an ominous and painful resemblance to the kind of puh-parle that were going on between Russia, Prussia, and Austria before the partition of Poland, and might well have seemed to call for a strong and unmistakable repudiation on the part of England. We could scarcely have been too emphatic or too precise in conveying to the Emperor of Russia our determination to have nothing to do with any such conspiracy. Time went on, and the Emperor thought he saw an occasion for still more clearly explaining his plans and for reviving the supposed understanding with England. Lord Aberdeen came into office as Prime Minister of this country. Lord Aberdeen, who was Foreign Secretary, when Nicholas was in England in 1844. On January 9, 1853, before the re-elections which were consequent upon the new ministerial appointments had yet taken place, the Emperor met our Minister, Sir G. Hamilton Seymour, at a party given by the Archduchess Helen at her palace in St. Petersburg, and he drew him aside and began to talk with him in the most outspoken manner about the future of Turkey and the arrangements it might be necessary for England and Russia to make regarding it. The conversation was renewed again and again afterwards. Few conversations have had greater fame than these. One phrase which the Emperor employed has passed into the familiar political language of the world. As long as there is memory of an Ottoman Empire in Europe, so long the Turkey of the days before the Crimean War will be called the Sick Man. We have on our hands said the Emperor, a Sick Man, a very Sick Man. It will be a great misfortune if one of these days he should slip away from us before the necessary arrangements have been made. The conversations all tended toward the one purpose. The Emperor urged that England and Russia ought to make arrangements beforehand as to the inheritance of the Ottoman in Europe, before what he regarded as the approaching and inevitable day when the Sick Man must come to die. The Emperor explained that he did not contemplate nor would he allow a permanent occupation of Constantinople by Russia, nor on the other hand would he consent to see that city held by England or France or any other great power. He would not listen to any plans for the reconstruction of Greece in the form of a Byzantine Empire, nor would he allow Turkey to be split up into little republics, as Silhms, as he said, for the Coshutes and Motsinis of Europe. It was not made very clear what the Emperor wished to have done with Constantinople if it was not to be Russian, nor Turkish, nor English, nor French, nor Greek, nor yet a little republic, but it was evident at all events that Nicholas had made up his mind as to what it was not to be. He thought that Serbia and Bulgaria might become independent states. That is to say independent states such as he considered the Danubian principalities then to be, under my protection. If the reorganization of Southeastern Europe made it seem necessary to England that she should take possession of Egypt, the Emperor said he should offer no objection. He said the same thing of Kandia if England desired to have that island, he saw no objection. He did not ask for any formal treaty. He said indeed such arrangements as that are not generally consigned to formal treaties. He only wished for such an understanding as might be come to among gentlemen, and he was satisfied that if he had ten minutes conversation with Lord Aberdeen the thing could be easily settled. If only England and Russia could arrive at an understanding on the subject, he declared that it was a matter of indifference to him what other powers might think or say. He spoke of the several millions of Christians in Turkey whose rights he was called upon to watch over, and he remarked, the remark is of significance, that the right of watching over them was secured to him by treaty. The Emperor was evidently under the impression that the interests of England and of Russia were united in this proposed transaction. He had no idea of anything but the most perfect frankness so far as we were concerned. It clearly had not occurred to him to suspect that there could be anything dishonorable anything England might recoil from in the suggestion that the two powers are to enter into a plot to divide the sick man's goods between them while the breath was yet in the sick man's body. It did not even occur to him that there could be anything dishonorable in entering into such a compact without the knowledge of any other of the great European powers. The Emperor desired to act like a man of honour, but the idea of western honour was as yet new to Russia and it had not quite got possession of the mind of Nicholas. He was like the savage who is ambitious of learning the ways of civilization and who may be counted on to do whatever he knows to be in accordance with these ways, but who was constantly liable to make a mistake simply from not knowing how to apply them in each new emergency. The very consequences which came from Nicholas's confidential communications with our Minister would of themselves testify to his sincerity and in a certain sense to his simplicity. But the English government never, after the disclosures of Sir Hamilton Seymour, put any faith in Nicholas. They regarded him as nothing better than a plotter. They did not probably even make allowance enough for the degree of religious or superstitious fervor which accompanied and qualified all his ambition and his craft. Human nature is so oddly blunt that we ought not to be surprised if we find a very high degree of fanatical and sincere fervor in company with a crafty selfishness. The English government and most of the English people ever after looked on Nicholas as a determined plotter and plunderer who was not to be made an associate in any engagement. On the other hand, Nicholas was as much disappointed as an honest highwayman of the days of Captain McHeath might have been who on making a handsome offer of his share in a new enterprise to a trusted and familiar pal finds that the latter is taken with a fit of virtuous indignation and is hurrying off to Bow Street to tell the whole story. The English minister and the English government could only answer the Emperor's overtures by saying that they did not think it quite usual to enter into arrangements for the spoliation of a friendly power and that England had no desire to succeed to any of the possessions of Turkey. The Emperor doubtless did not believe these assurances. He probably felt convinced that England had some game of her own in hand into which she did not find it convenient to admit him on terms of partnership. He must have felt bitterly annoyed at the thought that he had committed himself so far for nothing. The communications were of course understood to be strictly confidential and Nicholas had no fear that they would be given to the public at that time. They were in fact not made publicly known for more than a year after, but Nicholas had the dissatisfaction of knowing that her Majesty's ministers were now in possession of his designs. He had the additional discomfort of believing that while he had shown his hand to them they had contrived to keep whatever designs of their own they were preparing a complete secret from him. One unfortunate admission, the significance of which will be seen hereafter was made on the part of the English government during the correspondence caused by the conversation between the Emperor and Sir Hamilton Seymour. It was Lord John Russell who inadvertently no doubt made this admission. In his letter to Sir Hamilton Seymour on February 9, 1853 he wound up with the words, The more the Turkish government adopts the rules of impartial law and equal administration, the less will the Emperor of Russia find it necessary to apply that exceptional protection which his Imperial Majesty has found so burdensome and inconvenient, though no doubt prescribed by duty and sanctioned by treaty. These conversations with Sir Hamilton Seymour formed by the episode in the history of the events that were then going on. It was an episode of great importance even to the immediate progress of the events, and it had much to do with the turn they took towards war, but there were great forces moving toward antagonism in the southeast of Europe that must in any case have come into collision. Russia with her ambitions, her tendency to enlarge her frontier on all sides, and her natural sympathies of race and religion with the Christian and Slav populations under Turkish rule must be for long have come into active hostility with the port. Even at the present somewhat critical time we are not under any necessity to persuade ourselves that Russia was actuated in the movements she made by merely selfish ambition and nothing else, that all the wrong was on her side of the coral and all the right upon ours. It may be conceded without any abrogation of patriotic English sentiment, that in standing up for the population so closely affine to her in race and religion, Russia was acting very much as England would have acted under similar circumstances. If we can imagine a number of English and Christian populations under this way of some Asiatic despot on the frontiers of our Indian empire, we shall admit that it is likely the sentiments of all Englishmen in India would be extremely sensitive on their behalf, and that it would not be difficult to get us to believe that we were called upon to interfere for their protection. Certainly anyone who should try to persuade us that after all these Englishmen were nearly as well off under the Asiatic and despotic rule as many other people, or as they deserved to be, would not have much chance of a patient hearing from us. The Russian emperor fell back a little after the failure of his efforts with Sir Hamilton Seymour, and for a while seemed to agree with the English government as to the necessity of not embarrassing Turkey by pressing too severely upon her. He was no doubt seriously disappointed when he found that England would not go with him, and his calculations were put out by the discovery. He therefore saw himself compelled to act with a certain moderation while feeling his way to some other mode of attack. But the natural forces which were in operation did not depend on the will of any empire or government for their tendency. Nicholas would have had to move in any case. There is really no such thing in modern politics as a genuine autocrat. Nicholas of Russia could no more afford to overlook the evidences of popular and national feeling among his people than an English sovereign could. He was a despot by virtue of the national will which he embodied. The national will was in decided antagonism to the tendencies of the Ottoman power in Europe, and afterwards to the policy which the English government felt themselves compelled to adopt for the support of that power against the schemes of the Emperor of Russia. There had long been going on a dispute about the holy places in Palestine. The claims of the Greek Church and those of the Latin Church were an antagonism there. The Emperor of Russia was the protector of the Greek Church. The kings of France had long had the Latin Church under their protection. France had never taken any views as to the necessity of maintaining the Ottoman power in Europe. On the contrary, as we have seen, the policy of England and that of France were so decidedly opposed at the time, when France favoured the independence of Egypt, and England would not hear of it, that the two countries very nearly came to war. Nor did France really feel any very profound sympathy with the pretensions which the Latin monks were constantly making in regard to the holy places. There was unquestionably downright religious fanaticism on the part of Russia to back up the demands of the Greek Church. But we can hardly believe that opinion in France, or in the cabinets of French ministers, really concerned itself much about the Latin monks, except in so far as political purposes might be subserved by paying some attention to them. But it happened somewhat unfortunately, that the French government began to be unusually active in pushing the Latin claims just then. The whole dispute on which the fortunes of Europe seemed for a while to depend was of a strangely medieval character. The holy places in which the Latins raised the claim were the Great Church in Bethlehem, the Sanctuary of the Nativity, with the right to place a new star there, that which formerly ornamented it having been lost, the Tomb of the Virgin, the Stone of Anointing, the Seven Arches of the Virgin in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. In the reign of that remarkably pious, truthful, and virtuous monarch, Francis I of France, a treaty was made with the Sultan by which France was acknowledged the Protector of the Holy Places in Palestine, and of the monks of the Latin Church, who took on themselves the care of the sacred monuments and memorials. But the Greek Church afterwards obtained firmens from the Sultan. Each Sultan gave away privileges very much as it pleased him, and without taking much thought of the manner in which his firmen might affect the treaties of his predecessors, and the Greeks claimed, on the strength of these concessions, that they had as good a right as the Latins to take care of the holy places. Disputes were always arising, and of course these were aggravated by the fact that France was supposed to be concerned in the protection of one set of disputants and Russia in that set of another. The French and the Russian Governments did in point of fact interfere from time to time for the purpose of making good their claims. The claims at length came to be identified with the states which respectively protected them. An advantage of the smallest kind gained by the Latins was viewed as an insult to Russia. A concession to the Greeks was a snub to France. The subject of controversy seemed trivial and odd in itself, but it had even in itself a profounder significance than many a question of diplomatic etiquette which has led great states to the verge of war or into war itself. Mr. Kinglake, whose brilliant history of the invasion of the Crimea is too often disfigured by passages of Solomon pompous monotony, has superfluously devoted several eloquent pages to prove that the sacredness of association attaching to some particular spot has its roots in the very soil of human nature. The custody of the holy places was in this instance a symbol of a religious inheritance to the monastic disputants and of political power to the diplomatists. It was France which first stirred the controversy in the time just before the Crimean War. That fact is beyond dispute. Before John Russell had hardly come into office when he had to observe in writing to Lord Cowley, our ambassador in Paris, that her majesty's government cannot avoid perceiving that the ambassador of France at Constantinople was the first to disturb the status quo in which the matter rested. Not Lord Russell went on to say that the disputes of the Latin and Greek churches were not very active, but without some political action on the part of France, those quarrels would never have troubled the relations of friendly powers. Lord John Russell also complained that the French ambassador was the first to speak of having recourse to force and to threaten the intervention of a French fleet. I regret to say, the dispatch continued, that this evil example has been partly followed by Russia. The French government were indeed unusually active at that time. The French ambassador, Monsieur de Lavlette, is said to have threatened that a French fleet would appear off Jaffa and even hinted at a French occupation of Jerusalem, when, as he significantly put it, we should have all the sanctuaries. One French army occupying Rome and another occupying Jerusalem would have left the world in no doubt as to the supremacy of France. The cause of all this energy is not far to seek. The prince-president had only just succeeded in procuring himself to be installed as emperor, and he was very anxious to distract the attention of the Frenchmen from domestic politics to some showy and startling policy abroad. He was in quest of a policy of adventure. This controversy between the Church of the East and the Church of the West tempted him into activity, as one that seemed likely enough to give him an opportunity of displaying the power of France and of the new system without any very great danger or responsibility. Technically therefore we are entitled to lay the blame of disturbing the peace of Europe in the first instance on the emperor of the French. But while we must condemn the restless and self-interested spirit which thus set itself to stir up disturbance, we cannot help seeing that the quarrel must have come at some time even if the plebiscite had never been invited and a new emperor had never been placed upon the throne of France. The emperor of Russia had made up his mind that the time had come to divide the property of the sick man, and he was not likely to remain long without an opportunity of quarrelling with anyone who stood at the side of the sick man's bed and seemed to constitute himself a protector of the sick man's interests. CHAPTER 25 THE EASTERN QUESTION PART III The key of the whole controversy out of which the Eastern War arose, and out of which indeed all subsequent complications in the East came as well, was said to be found in a clause of the Treaty of Coutchouk-Keyenarje. During the negotiations for the peace which took place in Vienna while the Crimean War was yet going on, the assembled plenty potentiaries declared that the whole dispute was owing to a misinterpretation of a clause in this unfortunate treaty. In a time much nearer to our own, the discussion on the same clause in the same treaty was renewed with all the old earnestness and with the same difference of interpretation. It may not perhaps give an uninitiated reader any very exalted opinion of the utility and beauty of diplomatic arrangements to hear that disputes covering more than a century of time and causing at least two great wars arose out of the impossibility of reconciling two different interpretations of the meaning of two or three lines of a treaty. The American Civil War was said with much justice to have been fought to obtain a definition of the limits of the rights of the separate states as laid down in the Constitution. The Crimean War was apparently fought to obtain a satisfactory and final definition of the seventh clause of the Treaty of Khayinarje, and it did not fulfill its purpose. The historic value therefore of this seventh clause may in one sense be considered greater than that of the famous disputed words which provoked the censure of the Jansenists and the immortal letters of Pascal. The Treaty of Khayinarje was made in 1774 between the Ottoman Port and Catherine II of Russia. On sea and land the arms of the great Empress had been victorious. Turkey was beaten to her knees. She had to give up Azov and Tagorok to Russia and to declare the Crimea independent of the Ottoman Empire, an event which it is almost needless to say was followed not many years after by the Russians taking the Crimea for themselves and making it a province of Catherine's Empire. The Treaty of Khayinarje, as it is usually called, was that which made the arrangements for peace. When it exacted from Turkey such heavy penalties in the shape of session of territory, it was hardly supposed that one seemingly insignificant clause was destined to threaten the very existence of the Turkish Empire. The Treaty bore date July 10, 1774, and it was made so to speak in the tenth of the victor. The seventh clause declared that the sublime port promised to protect constantly the Christian religion and its churches and also to allow the Minister of the Imperial Court of Russia to make on all occasions representations as well in favor of the new church in Constantinople, of which mention will be made in the fourteenth article, as in favor of those who officiate therein, promising to take such representations into due consideration as being made by a confidential functionary of a neighboring and sincerely friendly power. Not much possibility of misunderstanding about these words, one might feel inclined to say. We turn then to the fourteenth article alluded to in order to discover if in its wording lies the perplexity of meaning which led to such momentous and calamitous results. We find that by this article it is simply permitted to the Court of Russia to build a public church of the Greek right in the Galata Quarter of Constantinople, in addition to the chapel built in the House of the Minister, and it is declared that the new church shall be always under the protection of the ministers of the Russian Empire and shielded from all obstruction and all damage. Here then we seem to have two clauses of the simplest meaning and by no means of first class importance. The latter clause allows Russia to build a new church in Constantinople, the former allows the Russian minister to make representations to the port on behalf of the church and of those who officiate in it. What difference of opinion it may be asked could possibly arise. The difference was this, Russia claimed a right of protectorate over all the Christians of the Greek church in Turkey as the consequence of the seventh clause of the treaty. She insisted that when Turkey gave her a right to interfere on behalf of the worshipers in one particular church, the same right extended so far as to cover all the worshipers of the same denomination in every part of the Ottoman dominions. The great object of Russia throughout all the negotiations that preceded the Crimean War was to obtain from the port an admission of the existence of such a protectorate. Such an acknowledgement would, in fact, have made the Emperor of Russia, the patron, and all but the ruler, by far the larger proportion of the populations of European Turkey. The Sultan would no longer have been master in his own dominions. The Greek Christians would naturally have regarded the Russian Emperor's right of intervention on their behalf as constituting a protectorate far more powerful than the nominal rule of the Sultan. They would have known that the ultimate decision of any dispute in which they were concerned rested with the Emperor and not with the Sultan, and they would soon have come to look upon the Emperor and not the Sultan as their actual sovereign. Now it does not seem likely on the face of things that any ruler of a state would have consented to hand over to a more powerful foreign monarch such a right over the great majority of his subjects. Still, if Turkey, driven to her last defences, had no alternative but to make such a concession, the Emperors of Russia could not be blamed for insisting that it should be carried out. The terms of the article in the treaty itself certainly do not seem to admit of such a construction. But for the views always advocated by Mr. Gladstone, we should say it was self-evident that the article never had any such meaning. We cannot, however, dismiss the argument of such a man as Mr. Gladstone as if it were unworthy of consideration, or say that an interpretation is obviously erroneous, which he has deliberately and often declared to be accurate. We may as well mention here at once that Mr. Gladstone rests his arguments on the first line of the famous article. The promise of the Sultan, he contends, to protect constantly the Christian religion and its churches, is an engagement distinct in itself, and disconnected from the engagement that follows in the same clause and which refers to the new building and its ministrants. The Sultan engages to protect the Christian churches, and with whom does he enter into this engagement, with the Sovereign of Russia. Why does he make this engagement? Because he has been defeated by Russia and compelled to accept terms of peace, and one of the conditions on which he is admitted to peace is his making this engagement. How does he make the engagement? By an article in a treaty agreed to between him and the Sovereign of Russia. But if a state enters into treaty engagement with another that it will do a certain thing, it is clear that the other state must have a special right of remonstrance and of representation if the thing be not done. Therefore Mr. Gladstone argues that as the Sultan made a special treaty with Russia to protect the Christians, he gave in the very nature of things a special right to Russia to complain if the protection was not given. We are far from denying that there is force in the argument, and it is at all events worthy of being recorded for its mere historical importance. But Mr. Gladstone's was certainly not the European interpretation of the clause, nor does it seem to us the interpretation that history will accept. Lord John Russell, as we have seen, made a somewhat unlucky admission that the claims of Russia to a protectorate were prescribed by duty and sanctioned by treaty. But this admission seems rather to have been the result of inadvertence or heedlessness than of any deliberate intention to recognize the particular claim involved. The admission was afterwards made the occasion of many a severe attack upon Lord John Russell by Mr. Disraeli and other leading members of the opposition. Assuredly, Lord John Russell's admission, if it is really to be regarded as such, was not endorsed by the English government. Whenever we find Russia putting the claim into plain words, we find England through her ministers refusing to give it their acknowledgment. During the discussions before the Crimean War, Lord Clarendon, our foreign secretary, wrote to Lord Stratford de Redcliff a letter embodying the views of the English government on the claim. No sovereign, Lord Clarendon says, having a due regard for his own dignity and independence, could admit proposals which conferred upon a foreign and more powerful sovereign a right of protection over his own subjects. If such a concession were made, the result, as Lord Clarendon pointed out, would be that fourteen millions of Greeks would hence-forward regard the emperor as their supreme protector and their allegiance to the sultan would be little more than nominal, while his own independence would dwindle into vassalage. Diplomacy therefore was powerless to do good during all the protracted negotiations that set in, for the plain reason that the only object of the emperor of Russia, in entering upon negotiation at all, was one which the other European powers regarded as absolutely inadmissible. The dispute about the holy places was easily settled. The port cared very little about the matter, and was willing enough to come to any fair terms by which the whole controversy could be got rid of. But the demands of Russia went on just as before. Prince Menchnikov, a man of the Potemkin School, fierce, rough, and unable or unwilling to control his temper, was sent with demands to Constantinople, and his very manner of making the demand seemed as if it were taken up for the purpose of ensuring their rejection. If the envoy fairly represented the sovereign, the demands must have been so conveyed with the deliberate intention of immediately and irresistibly driving the Turks to reject every proposition coming from such a negotiator. Menchnikov brought his proposals with him cut and dry in the form of a convention which he called upon Turkey to accept without more ado. In other words, he put a pistol at Turkey's head, and told her to sign it once or else he would pull the trigger. Turkey refused, and Prince Menchnikov withdrew in real or affected rage, and presently the emperor Nicholas sent two divisions of his army across the Prut to take possession of the Danubian principalities. Diplomacy however did not give in even then. The emperor announced that he had occupied the principalities not as an act of war, but with the view of obtaining material guarantees for the concession of the demands which Turkey had already declared that she would not concede. The English government advised the port not to treat the occupation as an act of war, although fully admitting that it was strictly a causes belly, and that Turkey would have been amply justified in meeting it by an armed resistance if it were prudent for her to do so. It would of course have been treated as war by any strong power. We might well have retorted upon Russia the harsh but not wholly unjustifiable language she had employed toward us when we seized possession of material guarantees from the Greek government and the harbor of the Piraeus. In our act, however, there was less of that which constitutes war than in the arbitrary conduct of Russia. Greece did not declare that our demands were such as she could not admit in principle. She did admit most of them in principle, but was only, as it seemed to our government, or at least to Lord Palmerston, trying to evade an actual settlement. There was nothing to go to war about, and our seizure of the ships objectionable as it was might be described as only a way of getting hold of a material guarantee for the discharge of a debt which was not in principle disputed. But in the dispute between Russia and Turkey, the claim was rejected altogether. It was declared intolerable. Its principle was absolutely repudiated, and any overt act on the part of Russia must therefore have had for its object to compel Turkey to submit to a demand which she would yield to force alone. This is, of course, in the very spirit of war, and if Turkey had been a stronger power she would never have dreamed of meeting it in any other way than by unarmed resistance. She was, however, strongly advised by England and other powers to adopt a moderate course, and in fact, throughout the whole of the negotiations, she showed a remarkable self-control and a dignified courtesy which must sometimes have been very vexing to her opponent. Diplomacy went to work again, and a Vienna note was concocted which Russia had once offered to accept. The four great powers who were carrying on the business of mediation were at first quite charmed with the note, with the readiness of Russia to accept it, and with themselves, and but for the interposition of Lord Stratford to Redcliff it seems highly probable that it would have been agreed to by all the parties concerned. Lord Stratford, however, saw plainly that the note was a virtual concession to Russia of all that she specially desired to have, and all that Europe was unwilling to concede to her. The great object of Russia was to obtain an acknowledgment, however vague or covert, of her protectorate over the Christians of the Greek Church and the Sultans' Dominions, and the Vienna note was so constructed as to affirm much rather than to deny the claim which Russia had so long been setting up. Assuredly such a note could at some future time have been brought out in triumph by Russia as an overwhelming evidence of the European recognition of such a protectorate. Let us make this a little more plain. Suppose the question at issue were as to the payment of a tribute claimed by one prince from another. The one had been always insisting that the other was his vassal, bound to pay him tribute. The other always repudiated the claim in principle. This was the subject of dispute. After a while the question is left to arbitration and the arbitrators without actually declaring in so many words that the claim to the tribute is established yet goes so far as to direct the payment of a certain sum of money, and do not introduce a single word to show that in their opinion the original claim was unjust in principle. Would not the claimant of the tribute be fully entitled in after years if any new doubt of his claim were raised to appeal to this arbitration as confirming it? Would he not be entitled to say, The dispute was about my right to tribute. Here is a document awarding to me the payment of a certain sum, and not containing a word to show that the arbitrators disputed the principle of my claim. Is it possible to construe that otherwise than as a recognition of my claim? We certainly cannot think it would have been otherwise regarded by any impartial mind. The very readiness with which Russia consented to accept the Vienna note ought to have taught its framers that Russia found all her account in its vague and ambiguous language. The prince consort said it was a trap laid by Russia through Austria, and it seems hardly possible to regard it now in any other light. The Turkish government, therefore, acting under the advice of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, our ambassador to Constantinople, who had returned to his post after a long absence, declined to accept the Vienna note unless with considerable modifications. Lord Stratford de Redcliffe showed great acuteness and force of character throughout all these negotiations. A reader of Mr. Kinglake's history is sometimes apt to become nauseated by the absurd pompousness with which the historian overlays his descriptions of the great Elci, as he is pleased to call him, and is inclined to wish that the great Elci could have imparted some of his own sober gravity and severe simplicity of style to his agilator. Mr. Kinglake writes of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe as if he were describing the all-compelling movements of some divinity or providence. A devoted imperial historian would have made himself ridiculous by writing of the great Napoleon at the height of his power, in language of such inflated mysticism, as this educated Englishman has allowed himself to employ when describing the manner in which our ambassador to Constantinople did his duty during the days before the Crimean War. But the extraordinary errors of taste and good sense into which Mr. Kinglake occasionally descends cannot prevent us from doing justice to the keen judgment and the inflexible will which Lord Stratford displayed during this critical time. He saw the fatal defect of the note which prepared in Paris had been brought to its supposed perfection at Vienna, and had there received the adhesion of the English government along with that of the governments of the other great powers engaged in the conference. A hint from Lord Stratford made the ministers of the port considerate with suspicious scrutiny, and they too saw its weakness and its conscious or unconscious treachery. They declared that unless certain modifications were introduced they would not accept the note. The reader will at first think perhaps that some of these modifications were mere splitting of hairs and diplomatic worse even than lawyer like quibbles, but in truth the alterations demanded were of the greatest importance for Turkey. The port had to think not of the immediate purpose of the note, but of the objects it might be made to serve afterwards. It contained for instance words which declared that the government of His Majesty the Sultan would remain faithful to the letter and the spirit of the stipulations of the treaties of Cayenarje and of Adrianople relative to the protection of the Christian religion. These words, in a note drawn up for the purpose of satisfying the Emperor of Russia, could not but be understood as recognizing the interpretation of the treaty of Cayenarje on which Russia had always insisted. The port therefore proposed to strike out these words, and substitute the following. To the stipulations of the treaty of Cayenarje, confirmed by that of Adrianople, relative to the protection by the sublime port of the Christian religion. By these words the Turkish ministers quietly affirmed that the only protectorate exercised over the Christians of Turkey is that of the Sultan of Turkey himself. The difference is simply that between a claim conceded and a claim repudiated. The Russian government refused to accept the modifications, and in arguing against them, the Russian minister Count Nesleroda made it clear to the English government that Lord Stratford to Redcliffe was right when he held the note to be full of weakness and of error. For the Russian minister argued against the modifications on the very ground that they denied to the claims of Russia just that satisfaction that the statesmanship and the public opinion of Europe had always agreed to refuse. The Prince Consort's expression was appropriate. The Western powers had nearly been caught in a trap. From that time all hopes of peace were over. There were, to be sure, other negotiations still. A ghastly semblance of faith in the possibility of a peaceful arrangement was kept up for a while on both sides. Little plans of adjustment were tinkered up and tried, and fell to pieces the moment they were tried. It is not necessary for us to describe them. Not many persons put any faith or even professed any interest in them. They were conducted amid the most energetic preparations for war on both sides. Our troops were moving toward Malta, the streets of London, of Liverpool of Southampton, and other towns were ringing with the cheers of enthusiastic crowds gathered together to watch the marching of troops destined for the East. Turkey had actually declared war against Russia. People now were anxious rather to see how the war would open between Russia and the Allies than when it would open. The time when would evidently only be a question of a few days. Put away how was a matter of more peculiar interest. We had known so little of war, for nearly forty years, that added to all the other emotions which the coming of a battle must bring, was the mere feeling of curiosity as to the sensation produced by a state of war. It was an abstraction to the living generation, a thing to be read of, and discuss, and make poetry and romance out of. But they could not yet realize what itself was like. End of section 19