took the lead in the settlement. It was only after
Palmerston had succeeded to the direction of our foreign policy in 1830,
that it was discovered how far the victory of Russia in war had placed
her in a position to dictate the general policy of the Ottoman court.

Wellington experienced no difficulty in striking out a line of policy
along which he could carry France with him. On February 21 De la
Ferronays, who had been recalled from the French embassy at St.
Petersburg to occupy the post of foreign minister in the new liberal
administration, which had been formed in France in December, 1827,
despatched a note urging the immediate employment of energetic measures
against the Porte. He saw that the hati-sherif gave special occasion of
war to Russia, and he was naturally anxious to anticipate her isolated
action by combined measures of coercion. He had, however, nothing better
to suggest than the execution of the Russian proposals of January 6.
Wellington, in his reply, dated the 26th, rightly minimised the
seriousness of the hati-sherif, and characterised the proposed measures
of coercion as destined to be ineffectual. He also expressed the fear
that if the three powers combined to make war on the Turks there would
be a general insurrection of the subject races in the Turkish dominions
which might last indefinitely. He therefore proposed first to settle the
Greek question by local pressure, after which he anticipated no serious
trouble about events at Constantinople. On the same day he drafted a
memorandum to the cabinet in which he proposed that the allied squadrons
should proceed to the Archipelago, blockade the Morea and Alexandria,
destroy the Greek pirates, stop the warfare in Chios and Crete, and call
upon the Greek government to withdraw the forces which were operating
in western and eastern Greece respectively under the command of two
foreign volunteers, General Church and Colonel Fabvier. In other words,
he proposed to coerce not the Porte but the actual combatants, Greece
and Egypt, and to check each party where it was the aggressor. If the
prime object of the government in the eastern question was the
maintenance of order, these proposals were excellent. The one capital
defect of the whole scheme was that it ignored the Russian desire for
war, which rendered it impossible for the tsar to postpone the
settlement of his own grievances until an arrangement should be come to
on the Greek question; on the other ha