This advice was surely statesmanlike.  To support the young and growing nationalities in Turkey would serve, not only to checkmate the supposed aggressive designs of Russia, but also to array on the side of Britain the progressive forces of the East.  To rely on the Turk was to rely on a moribund creature.  It was even worse.  It implied an indirect encouragement to the “sick man” to enter on a strife for which he was manifestly unequal, and in which we did not mean to help him.  But these considerations failed to move Lord Beaconsfield and the Foreign Office from the paths of tradition and routine[126].

[Footnote 125:  Sir William White:  Life and Correspondence, pp. 115-117.]

[Footnote 126:  For the power of tradition in the Foreign Office, see Sir William White:  Life and Correspondence, p. 119.]

Finally, in looking at the events of 1875-76 in their broad outlines, we may note the verdict of a veteran diplomatist, whose conduct before the Crimean War proved him to be as friendly to the interests of Turkey as he was hostile to those of Russia, but who now saw that the situation differed utterly from that which was brought about by the aggressive action of Czar Nicholas I. in 1854.  In a series of letters to the Times he pointed out the supreme need of joint action by all the Powers who signed the Treaty of Paris; that that treaty by no means prohibited their intervention in the affairs of Turkey; that wise and timely intervention would be to the advantage of that State; that the Turks had always yielded to coercion if it were of overwhelming strength, but only on those terms; and that therefore the severance of England from the European Concert was greatly to be deplored[127].  In private this former champion of Turkey went even farther, and declared on Sept. 10, 1876, that the crisis in the East would not have become acute had Great Britain acted conjointly with the Powers[128].  There is every reason to believe that posterity will endorse this judgment of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe.

[Footnote 127:  Letters of Dec. 31, 1875, May 16, 1876, and Sept. 9, 1876, republished with others in The Eastern Question, by Lord Stratford de Redcliffe (1881).]

[Footnote 128:  J. Morley, Life of Gladstone, vol. ii. p. 555.]

CHAPTER VIII

THE RUSSO-TURKISH WAR

“Knowledge of the great operations of war can be acquired only by experience and by the applied study of the campaigns of all the great captains.  Gustavus, Turenne, and Frederick, as well as Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar, have all acted on the same principles.  To keep one’s forces together, to bear speedily on any point, to be nowhere vulnerable,—­such are the principles that assure victory.”—­NAPOLEON.

Despite the menace to Russia contained in the British Note of May 1, 1877, there was at present little risk