-house for a quarter of a century
longer. If sagacious calculation in such a vein as this were the
mainspring of the world, history would be stripped of many a crimson
page. But far-sighted calculation can no longer be ascribed to the
actors in this tragedy of errors--to Nicholas or Napoleon, to Aberdeen
or Palmerston, or to any other of them excepting Cavour and the Turk.

In England both people and ministers have been wont to change their
minds upon the Eastern question. In the war between Russia and Turkey in
1828, during the last stage of the struggle for Greek independence,
Russia as Greek champion against the Turk had the English populace on
her side; Palmerston was warmly with her, regarding even her advance to
Constantinople with indifference; and Aberdeen was reproached as a
Turkish sympathiser. Now we shall see the parts inverted,--England and
Palmerston ardent Turks, and Aberdeen falling into disgrace (unjustly
enough) as Russian. Before we have done with Mr. Gladstone, the popular
wheel will be found to make another and yet another revolution.

III

THE BRITISH CABINET

When Kinglake's first two volumes of his history of the Crimean war
appeared (1863), Mr. Gladstone wrote to a friend (May 14): 'Kinglake is
fit to be a brilliant popular author, but quite unfit to be a historian.
His book is too bad to live, and too good to die. As to the matter most
directly within my cognisance, he is not only not too true, but so
entirely void of resemblance to the truth, that one asks what was really
the original of his picture.'[297] A little earlier he had written to
Sir John Acton: 'I was not the important person in the negotiation
before the war that Mr. Kinglake seems to suppose; and with him every
supposition becomes an axiom and a dogma.' All the papers from various
sources to which I have had access show that Mr. Gladstone, as he has
just said, had no special share in the various resolutions taken in the
decisive period that ended with the abandonment of the Vienna note in
the early autumn of 1853. He has himself told us that through the whole
of this critical stage Lord Clarendon, then in charge of foreign
affairs, was the centre of a distinct set of communications, first, with
the prime minister, next, with Lord John Russell as leader in the
Commons, and third, with Lord Palmerston, whose long and active career
at the foreign office had given him