ial and even eager loyalty to the prime
minister, Lord Granville disagreed with him upon the question of
diplomatic action against annexation. Palmerston, he said to Mr. Gladstone
in October, "wasted the strength derived by England by the great war by
his brag. I am afraid of our wasting that which we at present derive from
moral causes, by laying down general principles when nobody will attend to
them, and when in all probability they will be disregarded. My objection
to doing at present what you propose is, that it is impossible according
to my views to do so without being considered to throw our weight into the
French scale against Germany, with consequent encouragement on one side
and irritation on the other."

Like Thiers, Mr. Gladstone had been leaning upon the concurrence of the
neutral Powers, and active co-operation at St. Petersburg. Russian objects
were inconsistent with the alienation of Germany, and they made a fatal
bar to all schemes for lowering the German terms. This truth of the
situation was suddenly brought home to England in no palatable way.

Chapter VI. The Black Sea. (1870-1871)

"You are always talking to me of principles. As if your public law
were anything to me; I do not know what it means. What do you
suppose that all your parchments and your treaties signify to me?"

--ALEXANDER I. To TALLEYRAND.

I

At the close of the Crimean war in 1856 by the provisions of the treaty of
Paris, Russia and Turkey were restrained from constructing arsenals on the
coast of the Euxine, and from maintaining ships of war on its waters. No
serious statesman believed that the restriction would last, any more than
Napoleon's restraint on Prussia in 1808 against keeping up an army of more
than forty thousand men could last. Palmerston had this neutralisation
more at heart than anybody else, and Lord Granville told the House of
Lords what durability Palmerston expected for it:--

General Ignatieff told me that he remarked to Lord Palmerston,
"These are stipulations which you cannot expect will last long,"
and Lord Palmerston replied, "They will last ten years." A learned
civilian, a great friend of mine, told me he heard Lord Palmerston
talk on the subject, and say, "Well, at all events they will last
my life." A noble peer, a colleague of mine, an intimate friend of
Lord Palmerston, says Lord Palmerston told him they would last
seven years.(220