[Footnote 88:  For the treaty and the firman of 1856, see The European Concert in the Eastern Question, by T.E.  Holland; also Debidour, Histoire diplomatique de l’Europe (1814-1878), vol. ii. pp. 150-152; The Eastern Question, by the late Duke of Argyll, vol. i. chap. i.]

The chief diplomatic result of the Crimean War, then, was to substitute a European recognition of religious toleration in Turkey for the control over her subjects of the Greek Church which Russia had claimed.  The Sublime Porte was now placed in a stronger position than it had held since the year 1770; and the due performance of its promises would probably have led to the building up of a strong State.  But the promises proved to be mere waste-paper.  The Sultan, believing that England and France would always take his part, let matters go on in the old bad way.  The natural results came to pass.  The Christians showed increasing restiveness under Turkish rule.  In 1860 numbers of them were massacred in the Lebanon, and Napoleon III. occupied part of Syria with French troops.  The vassal States in Europe also displayed increasing vitality, while that of Turkey waned.  In 1861, largely owing to the diplomatic help of Napoleon III., Moldavia and Wallachia united and formed the Principality of Roumania.  In 1862, after a short but terrible struggle, the Servians rid themselves of the Turkish garrisons and framed a constitution of the Western type.  But the worst blow came in 1870.  During the course of the Franco-German War the Czar’s Government (with the good-will and perhaps the active connivance of the Court of Berlin) announced that it would no longer be bound by the article of the Treaty of Paris excluding Russian war-ships from the Black Sea.  The Gladstone Ministry sent a protest against this act, but took no steps to enforce its protest.  Our young diplomatist, Sir Horace Rumbold, then at St. Petersburg, believed that she would have drawn back at a threat of war[89].  Finally, the Russian declaration was agreed to by the Powers in a Treaty signed at London on March 31, 1871.

[Footnote 89:  Sir Horace Rumbold, Recollections of a Diplomatist (First Series), vol. ii. p. 295.]

These warnings were all thrown away on the Porte.  Its promises of toleration to Christians were ignored; the wheels of government clanked on in the traditional rusty way; governors of provinces and districts continued, as of yore, to pocket the grants that were made for local improvements; in defiance of the promises given in 1856, taxes continued to be “farmed” out to contractors; the evidence of Christians against Moslems was persistently refused a hearing in courts of justice[90]; and the collectors of taxes gave further turns of the financial screw in order to wring from the cultivators, especially from the Christians, the means of satisfying the needs of the State and the ever-increasing extravagance of the Sultan.  Incidents which were observed in Bosnia by an Oxford scholar of high repute, in the summer of 1875, will be found quoted in an Appendix at the end of this volume.