course,' Lord John continued, 'to which Lansdowne, Palmerston,
Clarendon, Newcastle, and I would not have consented; so that you would
only have broken up your government if you had insisted upon it.' Then
the speaker added his belief that the Czar, even after the Turk's
acquiescence and submission, if we could have secured so much, would
have given the Sultan six months' respite, and no more. None of these
arguments ever eased the mind of Lord Aberdeen. Even in his last
interview with the departing ambassador of the Czar, he told him how
bitterly he regretted, first, the original despatch of the fleet from
Malta to Besika Bay (July 1853); and second that he had not sent Lord
Granville to St. Petersburg immediately on the failure of Menschikoff at
Constantinople (May 1853), in order to carry on personal negotiations
with the Emperor.[310]

An ultimatum demanding the evacuation of the Principalities was
despatched to St. Petersburg by England and France, the Czar kept a
haughty silence, and at the end of March war was declared. In the event
the Principalities were evacuated a couple of months later, but the
state of war continued. On September 14, English, French, and Turkish
troops disembarked on the shores of the Crimea, and on the 20th of the
month was fought the battle of the Alma. 'I cannot help repeating to
you,' Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord Palmerston (Oct. 4, 1854), 'which I
hope you will forgive, the thanks I offered at an earlier period, for
the manner in which you urged--when we were amidst many temptations to
far more embarrassing and less effective proceedings--the duty of
concentrating our strokes upon the heart and centre of the war at
Sebastopol.'[311] In the same month Bright wrote the solid, wise, and
noble letter that brought him so much obloquy then, and stands as one of
the memorials of his fame now.[312] Mr. Gladstone wrote to his brother
Robertson upon it:--

_Nov. 7, 1854._--I thought Bright's letter both an able and a manly
one, and though I cannot go his lengths, I respect and sympathise
with the spirit in which it originated. I think he should draw a
distinction between petty meddlings of our own, or interferences
for selfish purposes, and an operation like this which really is in
support of the public law of Europe. I agree with him in some of
the retrospective part of his letter.

Then came the dark days of the Crimean winter.

DID