nd
Palmerston had, moreover, drawn France and England into friendly
alliance. There was no shadow of doubt that the Christian subjects of
Turkey were grossly oppressed, and it is only fair to believe that
Nicholas, as the head of the Greek Church, was honestly anxious to rid
them of such thraldom. At the same time no one imagined that he was
exactly the ruler to expend blood and treasure, in the risks of war, in
the _role_ of a Defender of the Faith.

Count Vitzthum doubts whether the Emperor really contemplated the taking
of Constantinople, but it is plain that he meant to crush the Turkish
Empire, and England, knowing that the man had masterful instincts and
ambitious schemes--that suggest, at all events, a passing comparison
with Napoleon Bonaparte--took alarm at his restlessness, and the menace
to India, which it seemed to suggest. 'If we do not stop the Russians on
the Danube,' said Lord John Russell, 'we shall have to stop them on the
Indus.' It is now a matter of common knowledge that, when the Crimean
War began, Nicholas had General Duhamel's scheme before him for an
invasion of India through Asia. Such an advance, it was foreseen, would
cripple England's resources in Europe by compelling her to despatch an
army of defence to the East. It certainly looks, therefore, as if
Russia, when hostilities in the Crimea actually began, was preparing
herself for a sudden descent on Constantinople. Napoleon III., eager to
conciliate the religious susceptibilities of his own subjects, as well
as to gratify the Vatican, wished the Sultan to make the Latin monks the
supreme custodians of the Holy Places. Complications, the issue of which
it was impossible to forecast, appeared inevitable, and for the moment
there seemed only one man who could grapple with the situation at
Constantinople. Lord Palmerston altogether, and Lord John Russell in
part, sympathised with the clamour which arose in the Press for the
return of the Great Elchi to the Porte.

[Sidenote: LORD STRATFORD DE REDCLIFFE]

In the entire annals of British diplomacy there is scarcely a more
picturesque or virile figure than that of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe.
Capacity for public affairs ran in the blood of the Cannings, as the
three statues which to-day stand side by side in Westminster Abbey
proudly attest. Those marble memorials represent George Canning, the
great Foreign Minister, who in the famous, if grandiloquent, phrase
'called the New World into exist