financial measures. Our second year, if not specially brilliant,
might still have proved greatly advantageous to the country, had we
possessed the courage to resist popular clamour and to avoid war; but
this calamity aggravated all other causes of disunion and led to our
dissolution.'[301]

IV

ENGLAND SLOWLY DRAWN IN

On November 4, Clarendon wrote to Lord Aberdeen that they were now in an
anomalous and painful position, and he had arrived at the conviction
that it might have been avoided by firm language and a more decided
course five months ago. 'Russia would then, as she is now, have been
ready to come to terms, and we should have exercised a control over the
Turks that is now not to be obtained.' Nobody, I suppose, doubts to-day
that if firmer language had been used in June to Sultan and Czar alike,
the catastrophe of war would probably have been avoided, as Lord
Clarendon here remorsefully reflects. However that may have been, this
pregnant and ominous avowal disclosed the truth that the British cabinet
were no longer their own masters; that they had in a great degree, even
at this early time, lost all that freedom of action which they
constantly proclaimed it the rule of their policy to maintain, and which
for a few months longer some of them at least strove very hard but all
in vain to recover.

The Turks were driving at war whilst we were labouring for peace, and
both by diplomatic action and by sending the fleet to protect Turkish
territory against Russian attack, we had become auxiliaries and turned
the weaker of the two contending powers into the stronger. A few months
afterwards Mr. Gladstone found a classic parallel for the Turkish
alliance. 'When Aeneas escaped from the flames of Troy he had an ally.
That ally was his father Anchises, and the part which Aeneas performed
in the alliance was to carry his ally upon his back.' But the discovery
came too late, nor was the Turk the only ally. Against the remonstrances
of our ambassador the Sultan declared war upon Russia, and proceeded to
acts of war, well knowing that England and France in what they believed
to be interests of their own would see him through it. If the Sultan and
his ulemas and his pashas were one intractable factor, the French
Emperor was another. 'We have just as much to apprehend,' Graham wrote
(Oct. 27), 'from the active intervention of our ally as from the open
hostility o