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CHAPTER XVI.

Count Nesselrode.

CHAP. THE difference between a servant and a Minister of XVI. State lies in this :-that the servant obeys the orders given him, without troubling himself concerning the question whether his master is right or wrong; whilst a Minister of State declines to be the instrument for giving effect to measures which he deems to be hurtful to his country. The Chancellor of the Russian Empire was sagacious and politic; and his experience in the business of the State, and in the councils of Europe, went back to the great days when Nesselrode and Hardenberg, and Metternich and Wellington, set their seals to the same charter. That the Czar was wrong in these transactions against Turkey no man in Europe knew better than Count Nesselrode; and at first he had the courage to speak to his master so frankly that Nicholas, when he had heard a remark which tended to wisdom and moderation, would cry out, 'That is what the Chancellor is per'petually telling me!' But, unhappily for the Czar and for his empire, the Minister did not enjoy so commanding a station as to be able to put restraint upon his Sovereign, nor even perhaps to offer him

XVI.

counsel in his angry mood. He could advise with CHAP. Nicholas the Czar; but there were reasons which made his counsels unwelcome to a heated defender of the Greek faith. He was a member of the Church of England, and the maddening rumours of the day made out that into the jaws of this very Church of England Lord Stratford was dragging the Sultan and all his Moslem subjects. Then, too, Count Nesselrode was worldly; but, after all, the quality most certain to make him irksome to a Prince in a high state of religious or ecclesiastic excitement was his good sense. It was dangerous for a wise, able sinner like him to go near holy Nicholas the Pontiff, the Head of God's Orthodox Church upon earth, when he was hearing the voices from Heaven, when he was raging against the enemies of the Faith, and struggling to enforce his will upon mankind by utterances of the hated name of Canning, and interjections, and gnashing of teeth. Far from being able to make a stand against this consuming fury, Nesselrode did not even decline to be the instrument for disclosing to all the world his master's condition of mind.

the Czar

knowing

fleets of

France

When the Czar knew that the fleets of the Western State of Powers were coming up into the Levant, and that after the sword of England was now in the hands of Lord that the Stratford, he was thrown into so fierce a state, that his notions of what was true and what was not true -of what was plausible, and what was ascertainably false of what was a cause, and what was an effect -of what happened first, and what happened last,

The Czar used to call Lord Stratford Lord Canning.'

and England were

ordered to

the mouth

of the Dardanelles.

XVI.

His complaints to Europe.

CHAP. nay, almost, it would seem, his notions of what was the Bosphorus and what was the Hellespont," became as a heap of ruins. He was in the condition imagined by the Psalmist, when he prayed the Lord that his enemy might be 'confounded.' Count Nesselrode was forced to gather up his master's shivered thoughts, and, putting them as well as he could into the language of diplomacy, to address to all the Courts of Europe a wild remonstrance against the measures of the Western Powers. The approach of their fleets to an anchorage in the Ægean outside the Straits of the Dardanelles was treated in this despatch as though it were little less than a seizure of Constantinople; and it was represented that this was an act of violence which had entitled and compelled the Czar, in his own defence, to occupy the Principalities.t Lord Clarendon seized this weak pretence and easily laid it bare; for he showed that Nicholas, in his anger, was transposing events, and that the Czar's resolve to cross the Pruth was anterior to the occurrence which he now declared to have been the motive of his action. Then, in language worthy of England, our Foreign Secretary went on to vindicate her right to send her fleets whither she chose, so long as they were on the high seas, or on the coasts of a Sovereign legitimately assenting to their presence. Nearly at the same time the writer of the French Foreign Office despatches

Their refutation.

*The despatch which gave utterance to this raving treated an anchorage in the Ægean, outside the Dardanelles, as almost a virtual occupation of Constantinople.

+Eastern Papers,' part i. p. 342.

pursued the Czar through Europe with his bright, CHAP. cutting, pitiless logic.*

XVI.

Vienna

ence.

Of course, the vivacity of France and England tended to place Austria at her ease, and to make her more backward than she would otherwise have been in sending troops into the Banat; and, moreover, the separate action of the Western Powers was well calculated, as will be seen by - and - by, to undo the good which might be effected by the Conference of The the four Powers at Vienna. The Conference, how- Conferever, did not remit its labour. The mediating character which belonged to it in its original constitution was gradually changed, until at length it represented what was nothing less than a confederacy of the four Powers against Russia. It is true that it was a confederacy which sought to exhaust persuasion, and to use to the utmost the moral pressure of assembled Europe before it resorted to arms; and it is true also that it was willing to make the Czar's retreat from his false moves as easy and as free from shame as the nature of his late errors would allow but these were views held by the English Cabinet as well as by the Conference; and it is certain that, if our Government had seen clear, and had been free from separate engagements, it would have stood fast upon the ground occupied by the four Powers, and would have refused to be drawn into measures which were destined to be continually undoing the pacific work of the diplomatists assembled at Vienna.

These despatches bear the signature of M. Drouyn de Lhuys, but it was commonly believed at the time that they were written by a man on the permanent staff of the French Foreign Office.

VOL. I.

СНАР.

XVI.

land of be

a separate

under

standing with

France.

But partnership with the midnight associates of the 2d of December was a heavy yoke. With all The effect his heart and soul Lord Aberdeen desired the tranupon Engquillity of Europe; but he had suffered his Cabinet tangled in to enter into close friendly engagements with one to whom the tranquillity of Europe portended jail, and ill-usage, and death. The French Emperor had consented to engage France in an English policy; and he thought he had a right to insist that England should pay the price, and help to give him the means of such signal action in Europe as might drive away men's thoughts from the hour when the Parliament of France had been thrown into the felons' van.

The

French

The object at which the French Emperor was Emperor's aiming stands clear enough to the sight; but at this scheme of time the scheme of action by which he sought to action. attain his ends was ambiguous. In general, men are

ambiguous

prone to find out consistency in the acts of rulers, and to imagine that numberless acts, appearing to have different aspects, are the result of one steady design ; but those who love truth better than symmetry will be able to believe that much of the conduct of the French Emperor was rather the effect of clashing purposes than of duplicity. There are philosophers who imagine that the human mind (corresponding in that respect with the brain) has a dual action, and that the singleness of purpose observed in a decided man is the result of a close accord between the two engines of thought, and not of actual unity. Certainly it would appear that the Emperor Louis

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