The gentlemen of France standing aloof from the Government, 337 State of the Czar after knowing that the fleets of France and England were ordered to the mouth of the Dardanelles, His complaints to Europe, The danger of being entangled in a separate understanding Powerful means of coercing the Czar, Importance of refraining from a premature use of the power, Agreed to by the four Powers and accepted by Russia, The French Emperor does nothing to thwart the success of the CHAPTER XVII.—continued. APPENDIX. Note II.-Papers showing the difference which led to the rup- Note III.-The Vienna Note,' with the proposed Turkish modifications, showing the points of the difference, Note V.-Respecting the day on which the Czar and the Sul- ORIGIN OF THE WAR OF 1853 BETWEEN THE CZAR AND THE SULTAN. CHAPTER I. I. WHEN this century had half run its course, and CHAP. even during some few months afterwards, the peninsula which divides the Euxine from the Sea of Azoff was an almost forgotten land, lying out of the chief paths of merchants and travellers, and far away from all the capital cities of Christendom. Rarely went thither any one from Paris, or Vienna, or Berlin to reach it from London was a harder task than to cross the Atlantic; and a man of office receiving in this distant province his orders despatched from St Petersburg, was the servant of masters who governed him from a distance of a thousand miles. Along the course of the little rivers which seamed the ground, there were villages and narrow belts of tilled land, with gardens, and fruitful VOL. I. A I. 1850-51. CHAP. vineyards; but for the most part this neglected Crim Tartary was a wilderness of steppe or of The Crimea, mountain-range much clothed towards the west with tall stiff grasses, and the stems of a fragrant herb like southernwood. The bulk of the people were of Tartar descent, but no longer what they had been in the days when nations trembled at the coming of the Golden Horde; and although they yet held to the Moslem faith, their religion had lost its warlike fire. Blessed with a dispensation from military service, and far away from the accustomed battle-fields of Europe and Asia, they lived in quiet, knowing little of war except what tradition could faintly carry down from old times in low monotonous chants. In their husbandry they were more governed by the habits of their ancestors than by the nature of the land which had once fed the people of Athens, for they neglected tillage and clung to pastoral life. Watching flocks and herds, they used to remain on the knolls very still for long hours together; and when they moved, they strode over the hills in their slow-flowing robes with something of the forlorn majesty of peasants descended from warriors. They wished for no change, and they excused their content in their simple way by saying that for three generations their race had lived happy under the Czars.* * The villagers of Eskel (on the Katcha) declared this to me on the 23d of September 1854, and the date gives value to the acknowledgment, for these villagers had been witnessing the confusion and seeming ruin of the Czar's army. |