on that had peculiar advantages for defence, and for an object that
every other signatory power thought in itself a bad object. Third, they
might, in accordance with a wonderfully grand scheme suggested to
ministers, demand from Germany, all flushed as she was with military
pride, to tell us plainly whether she was on our side or Russia's; and if
the German answer did not please us, then we should make an offensive
alliance with France, Austria, Italy, and Turkey checking Russia in the
east and Germany in the west. A fourth plan was mutely to wait, on the
plea that whatever Russia might have said, nothing had been done. The
fifth plan was a conference. This was hardly heroic enough to please
everybody in the cabinet. At least it saved us from the insanity of a war
that would have intensified European confusion, merely to maintain
restraints considered valuable by nobody. The expedient of a conference
was effectively set in motion by Bismarck, then pre-occupied in his
critical Bavarian treaty and the siege of Paris. On November 12, Mr. Odo
Russell left London for Versailles on a special mission to the Prussian
king. The intrepidity of our emissary soon secured a remarkable success,
and the episode of Bismarck's intervention in the business was important.

(M113) Mr. Odo Russell had three hours' conversation with Count Bismarck
on November 21. Bismarck told him that the Russian circular had taken him
by surprise; that though he had always thought the treaty of 1856 too hard
upon Russia, he entirely disapproved both of the manner and time chosen
for forcing on a revision of it; that he could not interfere nor even
answer the circular, but to prevent the outbreak of another war he would
recommend conferences at Constantinople.(225) The conversation broke off
at four o'clock in the afternoon, with this unpromising cast. At ten in
the evening it was resumed; it was prolonged until half an hour beyond
midnight. "I felt I knew him better," Mr. Russell in an unofficial letter
tells Lord Granville (Nov. 30), "and could express more easily all that I
had determined to say to convince him that unless he could get Russia to
withdraw the circular, we should be compelled with or without allies to go
to war." Bismarck remained long obstinate in his professed doubts of
England going to war; but he gradually admitted the truth of the
consequences to which a pacific acceptance of "the Russian kick must
inevitably lead. And so he came round