pire, but
henceforth all of them apt to spread with dangerous contagion to
governments beyond Ottoman limits.

England, unlike France, had no systematic tradition upon this
complicated struggle. When war began between Russia and the Porte in
1771, we supported Russia and helped her to obtain an establishment in
the Black Sea. Towards the end of 1782 when Catherine by a sort of
royal syllogism, as Fox called it, took the Crimea into her own hands,
the whig cabinet of the hour did not think it necessary to lend Turkey
their support, though France and Spain proposed a combination to resist.
Then came Pitt. The statesman whose qualities of greatness so profoundly
impressed his contemporaries has usually been praised as a minister
devoted to peace, and only driven by the French Revolution into the long
war. His preparations in 1791 for a war with Russia on behalf of the
Turk are a serious deduction from this estimate. Happily the alarms of
the Baltic trade, and the vigorous reasoning of Fox, produced such an
effect upon opinion, that Pitt was driven, on peril of the overthrow of
his government, to find the best expedient he could to bring the
business to an end without extremities. In 1853 the country was less
fortunate than it had been in 1791.

A Russian diplomatist made a homely comparison of the Eastern question
to the gout; now its attack is in the foot, now in the hand; but all is
safe if only it does not fly to a vital part. In 1852 the Eastern
question showed signs of flying to the heart, and a catastrophe was
sure. A dispute between Greek and Latin religious as to the custody of
the holy places at Jerusalem, followed by the diplomatic rivalries of
their respective patrons, Russia and France, produced a crisis that was
at first of no extraordinary pattern. The quarrel between two packs of
monks about a key and a silver star was a trivial symbol of the vast
rivalry of centuries between powerful churches, between great states,
between heterogeneous races. The dispute about the holy places was
adjusted, but was immediately followed by a claim from the Czar for
recognition by treaty of his rights as protector of the Sultan's
Christian subjects. This claim the Sultan, with encouragement from the
British ambassador, rejected, and the Czar marched troops into the
Danubian provinces, to hold them in pledge until the required concession
should be made to his high protective claims. This issue was no good
cause for a general