tern Question.

Rarely has the mouldering away of the Turkish Empire gone on so
rapidly as at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Corruption and
favouritism paralyzed the Government at Constantinople; masterful
pachas, aping the tactics of Ali Pacha, the virtual ruler of Albania,
were beginning to carve out satrapies in Syria, Asia Minor, Wallachia,
and even in Roumelia itself. Such was the state of Turkey when the
Sultan and his advisers heard with deep concern, in October, 1801,
that the only Power on whose friendship they could firmly rely was
about to relinquish Malta. At once he sent an earnest appeal to George
III. begging him not to evacuate the island. This despatch is not in
the archives of our Foreign Office; but the letter written from Malta
by Lord Elgin, our ambassador at Constantinople, on his return home,
sufficiently shows that the Sultan was conscious of his own weakness
and of the schemes of partition which were being concocted at Paris.
Bonaparte had already begun to sound both Austria and Russia on this
subject, deftly hinting that the Power which did not early join in the
enterprise would come poorly off. For the present both the rulers
rejected his overtures; but he ceased not to hope that the anarchy in
Turkey, and the jealousy which partition schemes always arouse among
neighbours, would draw first one and then the other into his
enterprise.[235]

The young Czar's disposition was at that period restless and unstable,
free from the passionate caprices of his ill-fated father, and attuned
by the fond efforts of the Swiss democrat Laharpe, to the loftiest
aspirations of the France of 1789. Yet the son of Paul I. could hardly
free himself from the instincts of a line of conquering Czars; his
frank blue eyes, his graceful yet commanding figure, his high broad
forehead and close shut mouth gave promise of mental energy; and his
splendid physique and love of martial display seemed to invite him to
complete the campaigns of Catherine II. against the Turks, and to wash
out in the waves of the Danube the remorse which he still felt at his
unwitting complicity in a parricidal plot. Between his love of liberty
and of foreign conquest he for the present wavered, with a strange
constitutional indecision that marred a noble character and that
yielded him a prey more than once to a masterful will or to seductive
projects. He is the Janus of Russian history. On the one side he faces
the enormous problems o