Mediterranean of three-quarters of the globe. Egypt, Macedonia,
Asia-Minor, the country and early home of the cotton plant, are then the
immediate provinces of Russia, a realm with twenty million serfs,
subject to its policy and depending on its arbitrary will.

Here is a circumstance highly interesting to the United States.
Constantinople is the key to Russia. To be preponderant, she knows it is
necessary for her to be a maritime power. The Black Sea is only a lake,
like Lake Leman; the Baltic is frozen five months in a year. These are
all the seas she possesses. Constantinople is the key to the palace of
the Czars. Russia is already omnipotent on the Continent; once master of
the Mediterranean, it is not difficult to see that the power which
already controls three-quarters of the world, will soon have the fourth
quarter.

Whilst the victory of the nations of Europe would open to you the
markets, till now closed to your products, the consolidation of
despotism destroys your commerce unavoidably. If your wheat, your
tobacco, your cotton, were excluded from Europe but for one year, there
is no farm, no plantation, no banking-house, which would not feel the
terrible shock of such a convulsion.

And hand-in-hand with the commercial restrictions you will then see an
establishment of monarchies from Cape Horn to the Rio Grande del Norte.
Cuba becomes a battery against the mouth of the Mississippi; the
Sandwich Islands a barrier to your commerce on the Pacific; Russian
diplomacy will foster your domestic dissensions and rouse the South
against the North, and the North against the South, the sea-coast
against the inland States, and the inland States against the sea-coast,
the Pacific interests against the Atlantic interests; and when discord
paralyzes your forces, then comes at last the foreign interference,
preceded by the declaration, that the European powers having, with your
silent consent, inscribed into the code of international law, the
principle that every foreign power has the right to interfere in the
domestic affairs of any nation when these become a dangerous example,
and your example and your republican principles being dangerous to the
absolutist powers, and your domestic dissensions dangerous to the order
and tranquillity of Europe, and therefore they consider it their "duty
to interfere in America." And Europe being oppressed, you will have,
single-handed, to encounter the combined forces of the world! I say