telegraphs every hour; this is almost literally the case." She
raged loudly against the Russians. "And the language," she cried,
"the insulting language--used by the Russians against us! It makes the
Queen's blood boil!" "Oh," she wrote a little later, "if the Queen were
a man, she would like to go and give those Russians, whose word one
cannot believe, such a beating! We shall never be friends again till we
have it out. This the Queen feels sure of."

The unfortunate Prime Minister, urged on to violence by Victoria on
one side, had to deal, on the other, with a Foreign Secretary who was
fundamentally opposed to any policy of active interference at all.
Between the Queen and Lord Derby he held a harassed course. He gained,
indeed, some slight satisfaction in playing on the one against the
other--in stimulating Lord Derby with the Queen's missives, and in
appeasing the Queen by repudiating Lord Derby's opinions; on one
occasion he actually went so far as to compose, at Victoria's request,
a letter bitterly attacking his colleague, which Her Majesty forthwith
signed, and sent, without alteration, to the Foreign Secretary. But such
devices only gave a temporary relief; and it soon became evident that
Victoria's martial ardour was not to be sidetracked by hostilities
against Lord Derby; hostilities against Russia were what she wanted,
what she would, what she must, have. For now, casting aside the last
relics of moderation, she began to attack her friend with a series of
extraordinary threats. Not once, not twice, but many times she held over
his head the formidable menace of her imminent abdication. "If England,"
she wrote to Beaconsfield, "is to kiss Russia's feet, she will not be a
party to the humiliation of England and would lay down her crown," and
she added that the Prime Minister might, if he thought fit, repeat her
words to the Cabinet. "This delay," she ejaculated, "this uncertainty by
which, abroad, we are losing our prestige and our position, while Russia
is advancing and will be before Constantinople in no time! Then the
Government will be fearfully blamed and the Queen so humiliated that
she thinks she would abdicate at once. Be bold!" "She feels," she
reiterated, "she cannot, as she before said, remain the Sovereign of
a country that is letting itself down to kiss the feet of the great
barbarians, the retarders of all liberty and civilisation that exists."
When the Russians advanced to the outskirts of Consta