Two Chancellors Part 8

The insurrection of the Candiots, one will remember, in the autumn of 1866, surprised and moved Europe, scarcely recovered from the violent shock of Sadowa. Immoderately exaggerated by the journalists, who were more or less interested, after having excited lively sympathy in Russia, the insurrection ended by seriously occupying the attention of the chancellors, and seemed for a moment destined to bring before the cabinets the whole question of the Orient in its appalling _ensemble_.

Certain cabinets did not even seem greatly dismayed at the contingency: instead of conforming with the constant traditions of diplomacy in the Ottoman affairs, instead of quelling the disturbance and lessening as much as possible its proportions and bearings, M. de Moustier thought that he ought "to find means to pacify the Orient," and busied himself "in convoking a sort of _consultation of doctors_ to learn the opinion of each one concerning the remedy to be applied to the evil."[100] Still more astonishing was the language used by the government of Vienna, by the Power which up to that time and always had contented itself with sustaining Turkey _per fas et nefas_, without demanding anything from it, no more for the immediate subjects of the sultan than for the tributary provinces. Resolutely breaking with these habits of the past, M. de Beust, who had at this time just undertaken the direction of affairs in Austria, wrote on the 10th November, 1866, to his amba.s.sador at Paris that, while desiring to preserve the throne of the sultan, "Austria could not refuse its sympathies and its support in a certain degree to the Christian peoples of Turkey who have at times just demands to make, and who are connected with some of the peoples of the Austrian empire by close ties of blood and religion." Questioned some days later (28th November) by the envoy of Russia at the court of Vienna, the Austrian minister did not hesitate to reply that he was disposed to favor amongst the Christians of the Orient "the development of their autonomy and the establishment of a limited self-government by a bond of va.s.salage." Lastly, in a remarkable dispatch addressed to Prince Metternich and dated the 1st January, 1867, M. de Beust proposed "a revision of the treaty of Paris of the 30th March, 1856, and subsequent acts," announcing in advance his desire to make over, in the arrangement to intervene, the greater part to Russia. He had no trouble in showing that "the remedies through which they had sought, in the course of the last few years, to maintain the _statu quo_ in the Orient, had shown themselves insufficient to subdue the difficulties which grew with each day." "The physiognomy of the Orient taken as a whole,"

continued the dispatch, "shows itself to-day under an essentially different aspect from that which it had in 1856, and the stipulations of that epoch, exceeded as they are on more than one important point by after events, no longer answer to the necessities of the actual situation." In a word, M. de Beust looked to nothing less than to a joint intervention of the European Powers in the affairs of Turkey, without concealing that in such a situation, "there would be an opportunity to take into consideration, in a fitting degree, the natural _role_ which the commonalty of religious inst.i.tutions would secure for Russia in the Orient," and clearly showing the necessity of relieving the empire of the czars of the onerous conditions which were imposed upon it in the Black Sea, "in order to secure for himself by a conciliating att.i.tude the sincere cooperation of this Power in the questions of the Levant."

It was truly a bold plan; it did not even fail to violently shock the French feelings. Was it not in truth to erase with a single stroke a past of ten years, to lose all the fruit of the Crimean war? They had some repugnance in avowing to themselves that the treaty of 1856 had not existed for a long time, alas! since the day when the French government had broken by its gratuitous kindness towards Russia this cl.u.s.ter of the three great Occidental Powers which alone could a.s.sure its efficacious execution. Since then the act had gradually become void, had been violated in the majority of the stipulations; and the conference of Paris, charged nominally with watching over the observance of the treaty, was always restricted, as the Austrian dispatch observed, "in giving its sanction to facts accomplished outside of its sphere of action, and which were not in harmony with the agreements placed under its protection." However, on the day after Sadowa, Prince Gortchakof did not fail to seize the first opportunity to begin to prepare the epitaph of the treaty of Paris. "Our august master," said the Russian chancellor in a doc.u.ment dated the 20th August, 1866, and marked by fine irony,--"our august master does not intend to insist on the general engagements of the treaties _which have no value except by reason of the accord existing between the great Powers in order to make them respected_, and which to-day have received, by _the want of this joint will_, too frequent and too severe blows not to be rendered _invalid_."

It was exactly this _collective will_ which M. de Beust expected to revive and strengthen in projecting the revision of the act of 1856.

According to his opinion, the treaty of Paris had not attained its purpose, which was to insure the entireness and the vitality of the Ottoman empire. On one side the Occidental Powers have imposed on Russia on the banks of the Euxine a restriction of its rights of sovereignty which a great empire could not definitely accept, and from which sooner or later it would seek to free itself. On the other side, and as regards the Christian population of the Levant, they contented themselves with promulgating a firman promising reforms, and leaving Turkey to itself, instead of reserving for Europe the right to watch over the Ottoman government with a gentle but continued vigilance, so that it should fulfill its duties toward the rajahs, and by a wise and honest administration become independent and strong. The treaty of Paris had only, thought the Austrian minister, given to Russia what the Crimean war ought to have refused it above all,--the monopoly of influence over the rajahs; this monopoly it continued to exercise as in the past, in a hidden manner, it is true, but so much the more dangerously as it recognized no compet.i.tion. M. de Beust wished to reestablish the compet.i.tion, or rather he wished to establish a general agreement "to make the Christian populations of the sultan _the debtors of all Europe_, in giving them, by the care of all the guaranteeing courts, autonomous inst.i.tutions according to the diversity of religions and races,"[101] and he hesitated the less to make to this vast conception the sacrifice of the article of the treaty of Paris touching the neutralization of the Black Sea which Austria had combated from the beginning, and to which it had only given its adherence at the last moment to humor the Occidental Powers and put an end to the Crimean war, the events of which had since demonstrated its complete inefficacy. It was under the influence of the disaster of Sinopa that France and England had hoped to restrain the naval forces of the czar in the Euxine. They had thus thought to shelter Constantinople from a blow from the Russian hand; but on this point, as on so many others, the physiognomy of the Orient had essentially changed. Russia no longer meditated a _coup de main_: it advanced more slowly, but much more surely, towards its goal. The pacification of the Caucasus[102] the irremediable weakness of the Porte and the daily increasing discontent of the rajahs, as impatient of the Turkish yoke as they were devoted to their sole protector, the czar, were worth to it all the vessels of the Black Sea. "However, have they really freed Constantinople from all danger on that side?" asked the Austrian minister. "Supposing that Russia decides to construct vessels in the Sea of Asoph, will war be declared to hinder it?" And the cabinet of Vienna concluded by these characteristic words: "The question of _amour-propre_ should not be decisive in view of the immense interests which are at stake to-day." In fact, they could not insist too much on this truth: the clause on the subject of the Euxine had been for a long time only a "question of _amour-propre_" between the Occidental Powers and Russia; nor could one deny that M. de Beust saw far and justly in his dispatch of the 1st January, 1867. On the day after Sadowa, he sought to reconst.i.tute Europe, to regain it, if we are allowed to express ourselves thus, and he knew how to fix the price of it.

In a different direction, France exerted itself on its part to accede to the views of the cabinet of St. Petersburg in concentrating its efforts princ.i.p.ally on the question of the hour, on this Candian insurrection, of which public opinion in Russia had so ardently espoused the cause. M.

de Moustier proposed to Prince Gortchakof "an understanding on the eventualities which might arise in the Orient," and, after having already spoken of a "consultation of doctors," in a dispatch addressed to the amba.s.sador of France at Constantinople (7th December, 1866) he even p.r.o.nounced the words "heroic remedies." By this always medical euphemism, one understood, at Paris, the annexation of the isle of Crete to Greece, "the only possible issue," Prince Gortchakof had affirmed, the 16th November, 1866, "if the Powers will leave expedients and palliatives, which up to the present time have only increased for the future the present difficulties." The marriage of the young King of the Greeks, George I., with the Grand d.u.c.h.ess Olga Constantinovna, was then a decided matter, and at the Tuileries one demanded nothing better than to make the isle of Crete the "dowry" of the Russian princess. In fact they would not have felt any inconvenience, it seems, in increasing this dowry with Epirus and Thessaly: that was going very far, much farther even than could be desired by Russia, which had no interest in "allowing such an extension of Greece that it might become a powerful state."[103]

It was the reconciliation between France and Russia that gave birth to the plan of a common proceeding to demand of the Turkish government the realization of the internal reforms, and the cession of Crete, disguised under the proposition of a plebiscite, a proceeding which was effectively realized in the month of March, 1867, and to which Austria, Prussia, and Italy rallied. Without doubt there was still a great deal of vagueness, and above all of desultoriness in the situation which began to take a form at this moment, and it was to be regretted that France and Austria had not previously agreed to be of one mind on the nature of the offers which they intended to make to Russia; but the offers were very real and very great, we cannot deny that; and it only depended on the successor of Count Nesselrode to arrange, to adjust, and to turn them to the profit and the glory of his august master. England could not oppose serious obstacles to the joint will of France, Russia, and Austria, in the affairs of the Levant; it was already resigned, and certainly the fruit which Prince Gortchakof saw ripening in the spring of 1867, although not having all the attraction of forbidden fruit, was nevertheless good and savory, very different from that which, four years later, he was to pick up in the ashes of Sedan.

It is true that the governments of France and Austria did not mean to make a gratuitous gift; it was understood that, in exchange for these very large concessions in the Orient, they should obtain the support of the cabinet of St. Petersburg in the menacing complications of the Occident, and many circ.u.mstances seemed to plead in favor of such a combination. After all, and exclusive of the vengeance taken on "the ungrateful" empire of the Hapsburg, Russia could not greatly rejoice at the work of M. de Bismarck. Without mentioning several relations of the imperial family whom the Hohenzollern dethroned and despoiled with firmness tempered with a few tears, there was in general in the proceedings and principles inaugurated on the Elbe and the Main a strong revolutionary taint which could hardly please a court which did not cease to protect the shadow of Nicholas. The gravest, however, was that the victory of Sadowa had just brusquely disturbed and even threatened to ruin entirely the secular system of the Russian policy in regard to the affairs of Germany.

In fact, since Peter the Great, especially since Catherine II., Russia had always labored to obtain a preponderant influence among the different German courts: its czars have more than once acted with a high hand and used high words in the Teutonic troubles. "The Romanof enjoys with us a birthright acknowledged by his brothers, our sovereigns of the _Bund_," a celebrated publicist of the other side of the Rhine exclaimed with bitterness one day, and the att.i.tude of the secondary States during the Crimean war truly did not weaken the justice of this expression. But it was this work of several reigns, and of a thought hitherto immutable, that Russia saw placed in question by the foreseen results of the campaign of Bohemia. The North of Germany was already escaping its influence, and the "_naf_" ones alone could deceive themselves on the fortune reserved for the South in a very near future. "From the month of September, 1866, the cabinet of Berlin had, in a circular which was designedly made public, claimed for the confederation of the North and the States of the South alone, to the exclusion of all the other Powers, without excepting Austria, the right to bind their relations as closely as they wished, thus giving to Article IV. of the treaty of Prague, an interpretation of which it did not admit. In the speeches which he had delivered at the opening of the Prussian chambers and of the Northern parliament, the king himself, while addressing them _to Germany, to the brotherly peoples, to the country which the Alps and the Baltic bound_, had given utterance to allusions which made, according to the expression of the official journals, the hearts of all patriots tremble."[104] On his part, M. de Bismarck had cried out in the midst of the same parliament, using these gambling terms which are so common in his language and so characteristic of his temperament: "Our stake has become greater in consequence of our victories; we have now more to lose, but the game is still far from being completely won!" By means of a combined and resolute action of Europe; the absorption of all Germany by Prussia was only a question of time and of management; Russia, even less than France, would find its reward in it. France only saw uniting in a more compact and menacing body a confederation of kingdoms and princ.i.p.alities which already before had been either hostile, or at least opposed to it.

Russia, on the contrary, lost an entire league of states, whose fidelity and devotion had never wavered, who formed for it a sort of continuous _enceinte_ on the side of an occasionally unsympathetic Occident; in their place was to arise a formidable Power, restless and invading from the very start, called sooner or later by the necessity of history, by the fatality of race, to represent and to oppose the Germanic to the Sclavic idea. At every other epoch of the empire of the czars, in the good old time of Count Nesselrode, for instance,--when, in place of a policy of spite and propaganda on the banks of the Neva, they maintained a policy of conservation and equilibrium,--the conduct of a Russian chancellor in such an occurrence would not have been doubtful: a coalition of Russia, of France, and of Austria would have been formed on the day after Sadowa for the safety of Europe, and it is not saying too much to affirm that, in the spring of the year 1867, Alexander Mikhalovitch held in his hands the destinies of the world.

Thus compelled to make his choice, Prince Gortchakof was unwilling to decline the French and Austrian advances in the question of the Orient; on the contrary, he hastened to echo them loudly, and sometimes even rose on this occasion to a lyricism not often heard in the chancellors'

offices. He was charmed with the new minister of Austria, and filled all the country with a rather forced enthusiasm. "M. de Beust," he wrote to his amba.s.sador in London, "inaugurates a new era in the policy of Austria, an era of large and elevated views; he is the first statesman of this country and of our epoch who courageously endeavors to leave the ground of petty rivalries." As regards France, he endeavored especially to indicate plainly that the initiative came from it, and "while begging the Emperor Napoleon III. to recall the interviews which the Emperor Alexander had had with him at Stuttgart" (in 1860), he seemed to wish to a.s.sign to the present conferences an extraordinary character of gravity and generality. "His imperial majesty," continued the Russian chancellor, in his dispatch of the 16th November, 1866, to M. de Budberg, "has received with satisfaction the overtures which M. le Marquis de Moustier has made us in view of an understanding between the French cabinet and ours on the eventualities which might arise in the Orient. The general principles which the French minister of foreign affairs has propounded, the a.s.surances which he has given us, have in the eyes of our august master a very especial value, since they emanate from the direct thought of the Emperor Napoleon, and since it was by the express order of his majesty that M. le Marquis de Moustier has broached these questions." The animation and spirits of Alexander Mikhalovitch increase daily: he even ended by talking Latin and by confounding the poor Turkish envoy with a cla.s.sical quotation. "Here,"

he wrote in the month of February, 1867, "is what I have said to Comnenos-Bey: the isle of Crete is lost to you; after six months of such a bitter struggle, reconciliation is no longer possible. Even admitting that you succeeded in reestablishing there for some time the authority of the sultan, it would only be on a heap of ruins and a mountain of corpses. Tacitus long ago told us of the danger there is in this reign of silence which succeeds devastation: _Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant_."

Unfortunately it did not take long to see that while holding out hopes to France and Austria for the success of their Oriental movement, and even endeavoring to compromise them in this direction as much as possible,[105] the Russian chancellor was extremely careful to maintain his intimate accord with his former colleague of Frankfort, and not to oppose him in his ideas in the affairs of the Occident. Very ardent for the cause of the plebiscite in Crete, he showed on the contrary an absolute indifference on the subject of an a.n.a.logous cause on the Eider, otherwise legitimate, however, guaranteed by solemn treaties,[106] and which interested to such a high degree the n.o.ble and unfortunate country of the future empress. He preserved a not less significant silence as regarded the publication made in the month of March, 1867, by M. de Bismarck, of the conventions with the Southern States, conventions which bound to Prussia the military forces of Germany, and abolished, in fact, "the international independent situation" which the preliminaries of Nikolsburg had stipulated for Bavaria and Wurtemberg.[107] Alexander Mikhalovitch held Wurtemberg as cheaply as Denmark, the throne of Queen Olga, as the cradle of the Princess Dagmar. In the mean time the affair of Luxemburg arose, and the French government could measure the degree of benevolence with which it had succeeded in inspiring the cabinet of St. Petersburg by its "heroic remedies" as regards Turkey. The Russian chancellor was surely right and very sincere in his desire for peace, but he had not for the position of France the regards which England itself thought just to show it; he seemed, above all, engaged in not giving umbrage to his ill.u.s.trious friend of Berlin. While also glorifying M. de Beust for his "courageous endeavor to have done with petty rivalries," the Russian government did not fail to encourage at the same time, in the most dangerous and provoking manner, the violent Sclavic opposition in the empire of the Hapsburg by means of that famous _congress_ of Moscow, of which we shall speak later. Other deceptions still, less known to the public, but not less sharp, probably added to all these disappointments, for Austria as well as France did not delay in making their retreat from this shifting ground of the Orient and joining in with England in thenceforward firmly maintaining the rights of the sultan. The "consultation of doctors" had a final end, and the legendary _sick man_ was none the worse for it; but all was then decided for the terrible eventualities of the future.

"There exists an understanding between St. Petersburg and Berlin," M.

Benedetti again avowed in the year after (5th January, 1868), while speaking of the so often mentioned mission of General Manteuffel as the point of departure of this agreement which did not cease to hara.s.s him.

"Was it not, in fact, from this moment," he asked, "that the two courts indicate more plainly their policy, Russia in the Orient and in the Sclavic Provinces of Austria, Prussia in Germany, without even a cloud arising between them? Firmly united on all questions, they have, each for itself, pursued their designs with a confidence which proves that they have stipulated mutual guarantees." And the amba.s.sador adds that this conviction begins to impress itself on many minds, especially on Lord Loftus, his English colleague, for a long time very incredulous on this matter. "His manner of seeing is sensibly modified, and he is not less persuaded than other members of the diplomatic corps that final arrangements had been made between the two governments of King William and the Emperor Alexander. I have, for my part, found the permanent demonstration of it, if I may so express myself, in the firmly fixed resolution, which has never changed, of the cabinet of Berlin, to inaugurate German unity for its own especial benefit, without allowing itself to be moved for an instant by the possibility of a conflict with France. I have also seen the proof of it in the care with which M. de Bismarck avoids explaining himself on the question of the Orient. When one asks him, he replies that he never reads the correspondence of the ministers of the king at Constantinople; and your excellency will not have forgotten with what complaisance he has always lent himself to the views of Prince Gortchakof." M. Benedetti also notices "the new impulse given since last summer to the Pan-Sclavic propaganda;" he shows very clearly the vast designs and far-reaching hopes of the cabinet of St.

Petersburg, in its connivance with Prussia, and gives a higher and juster idea in general of the Russian policy at this epoch than certain ill-advised panegyrists of our day, who, to prove that Prince Gortchakof has filled his _role_ as completely as possible, and with all desirable success, can devise nothing better than to lessen and depreciate this part.

II.

It is the characteristic of all conventional praise to exaggerate not only the tone, but even to deceive itself sometimes in the amount; there is perfume and ashes in incense, said the ancients, and there is something equivocal also in the usual manner of congratulating the Russian chancellor on his "triumph" in the question of the Euxine. To pretend that Prince Gortchakof did not favor the audacious designs of Prussia in order to free Russia from its bonds in the Black Sea, that he delivered Europe in advance to Prince Bismarck in the sole hope of some day repudiating to his advantage the act of 1856, is in truth to pay as little honor to his genius as to his patriotism. Certainly the eminent statesman whose "prophetic glance" the grandchildren of Washington[108]

celebrated at St. Petersburg in the year of Sadowa, supplicating the eternal G.o.d, "who had made the sun stand still for Joshua," also to suspend the course of life for Alexander Mikhalovitch, "so that the eyes of the world might long remain fixed on him,"[109] the consummate diplomat who, in the spring of 1867, slighted the important advances made by the cabinets of Vienna and the Tuileries,--certainly this minister did not fail at this moment to put aside with a disdainful smile, the petty hypothesis, that in the approaching and foreseen overturning of Europe, there would be a.s.signed to Russia as its sole victory and conquest, the abolition of any wounding article of a treaty which events had long before rendered "invalid." It was not for such a "plate of lentils," to use the language of M. de Bismarck, that Prince Gortchakof intended to cede to the Hohenzollern the fixed _birthright_ of the Romanof; he did not think of abandoning the Occident for such a ridiculous price: he looked higher, and expected to have the lion's share in the quarry to come. Fortune has deceived his hopes, defeated his calculations, and forced him to bend to many unforeseen necessities; but, if it is puerile to allow him to have made virtues of all these vexatious necessities, and to form for him a sort of aureole of lightnings and thunderbolts of the war of 1870, history, in its impartiality, must not the less take into consideration the intentions of Prince Gortchakof, which were as great as the events themselves, and, without denying his defeat, nevertheless accord him the full benefit _in magnis voluisse_.

They cherished, in fact, great, gigantic projects on the banks of the Moscova and the Neva, in all this agitated and feverish epoch which separated Sedan from Sadowa; they deluded themselves with enchanting dreams; they divided the world between Sclavians and Germans, and the "national" minister responded to the ardent wishes of the entire nation in making the Prussian alliance the pivot of its policy, in seeing in it the absolute condition and the sure pledge of a future of glory and prosperity for Russia. We must look back on the universal mental agitation in consequence of the equally prodigious and unforeseen victory of Prussia in 1866, on the innumerable fantastic plans which were then suddenly formed for the reconstruction of empires and races; it is necessary to recall this endless flight of Minervas all armed, whom the blow of the German Vulcan's hammer caused to spring forth from so many cracked heads who thought themselves Olympian,--the general _remoulding_ which our poor philosophy of history, at once so cutting and so malleable, undergoes in the twinkling of an eye,--to appreciate justly the current of strange and impetuous ideas which then seized the people of Peter the Great and of Catherine II. "An irresistible power forces the people to reunite in great ma.s.ses, making the secondary States disappear, and this tendency is perhaps inspired by a sort of providential prevision of the destinies of the world." This, on the day after Sadowa, was the expression of an official doc.u.ment of incontestable authority, a diplomatic manifest which announced _urbi et orbi_ the profoundest thoughts of the imperial government of France.[110] How can one be astonished, then, that the children of Rourik followed the same reasoning, and asked themselves with candor if the battle of Koenigsgraetz did not entirely deliver Central Europe to the Hohenzollern and Oriental Europe to the Romanof? After some moments of hesitation and surprise, Muscovite patriotism resolved therefore, to take no umbrage at the ambition of King William I., but it immediately proclaimed that Russia also had a mission to fulfill, an "idea" to realize, and that the sun of national unities and grand combinations shone for all the world.

There was in the old capital of the czars a celebrated journal whose power has since greatly declined, and which, although now an ordinary paper only, but still important, then exercised a preponderant, tyrannic influence, from the Dwina to the Ural: it was occasionally called, and without malice, "the first power in the state after the emperor." From the time of the fatal insurrections of Poland, the "Gazette of Moscow"

was in truth the monitor of the popular pa.s.sions of Holy Russia, the office from whence the word of command for public opinion went forth into the vast empire of the North, and it often issued formal instructions for the directing ministers at St. Petersburg. Even at this time the all-powerful organ of M. Katkof made itself the mouth-piece of the nation, and imperiously traced the programme of the policy of the future. Only a short time after the conclusion of the peace of Prague, the journal of Moscow laid down "as an incontestable truth, that the march of events has produced interests which invite the two Powers of Russia and Prussia to ally themselves still more actively than in the past;" it affirmed, moreover, that overtures on this point had been made by M. de Bismarck, "overtures the more acceptable as Prussia has no interests in the Orient; on this question, the cabinet of Berlin could take, in concert with Russia, such an att.i.tude as suited it." The theme was again taken up and developed under many a form and in many an article, until a leader of the 17th February, 1867, impressed on it the great consecration of a speculative and humanitarian principle.

"The new era is at last sketched," one reads there, "and for us Russians it has a peculiar bearing. This era is truly ours; it calls to life a new world kept until now in the shadow and expectation of its destinies, the Graeco-Sclavic world. After centuries pa.s.sed in resignation and servitude, this world at last reaches the moment of renovation; what has so long been forgotten and down-trodden, comes back to the light and prepares for action. The present generations will see great changes, great facts, and great formations. Already on the peninsula of the Balkan, and under the worm-eaten couch of Ottoman tyranny, three groups of lively and strong nationalities are being formed, the h.e.l.lenic, Sclavic, and Roumanian groups. Closely bound among themselves by the commonalty of their faith and their historical destinies, these three groups are equally connected with Russia by all the ties of religion and national life. These three groups of nations once reconstructed, Russia will reveal itself in an entirely different light. It will no longer be alone in the world; in place of a sombre, Asiatic power, as it now seems to be, it will become a moral force indispensable to Europe, a Graeco-Sclavic civilization completing the Latin-German civilization, which without it would remain imperfect and inert in its sterile exclusiveness." Soon after descending from these rather abstract heights to the more practical ground of ways and means, the fiery apostle of the _new era_ exclaimed on the 7th April: "If France sustains by arms and by its political influence the _renaissance_ of the Latin races, if Prussia acts in the same manner _vis-a-vis_ to Germany, why, then, should not Russia, the only independent Sclavic Power, sustain the Sclavic races, and should it not prevent foreign Powers from placing obstacles in the way of their political development? Russia should employ all its powers to introduce in its neighbors of the South a transformation similar to that which took place in Central and Occidental Europe; _vis-a-vis_ the Sclavians it should take, without the least hesitation, the role which France has taken in regard to the Latin races and Prussia _vis-a-vis_ the German world. The task is a n.o.ble one, for _it is exempt from egotism_: it is beneficial, for it will achieve the triumph of the principle of nationalities, and will give a solid basis to the modern equilibrium of Europe; it is worthy of Russia and of its greatness; it is immense, and we have the firm conviction that Russia will fulfill it."

It was under the stimulant of such theories, hopes, and pa.s.sions, that, in the spring of the year 1867, the strange _ethnological exposition of Moscow_[111] was inst.i.tuted, which soon became the pretext for a great demonstration from without, sufficiently inoffensive in appearance to remove all diplomatic embarra.s.sment, well calculated, however, to produce its effect on _naf_ and inflammable minds, to fascinate unfortunate, disinherited people, richer in imagination than in culture.

Certainly, true science would draw very little profit from this projected reunion in the _manege_ of Moscow of all the Sclavic "types"

with their costumes, their arms, their domestic utensils, and their flora; but the undertaking was considered not the less worthy of the most august protection. The emperor and the empress offered considerable sums to defray the costs of the work, the Grand Duke Vladimir accepted the honorary presidency of it, the high dignitaries of the court and the church charged themselves with its direction. Warm appeals were addressed to the Sclavians of Austria and Turkey, to their different historical, geographical, or other learned societies, to add by numerous contributions to the magnificence of the exposition, and a cloud of emissaries collected in the countries of the Danube and of the Balkan in search of adhesion, samples, and "types." Committees were formed in different parts of the empire, in order to worthily prepare the reception of the "Sclavic guests," who did not fail to swarm to the "national jubilee," and soon a _congress_ was spoken of, in which should be discussed the wants and the interests of so many "brother peoples,"

the hopes and the griefs of the great common country, of the _ideal_ country. It was the moment, it is necessary to recall it, when the Cretan insurrection, always persistent, stirred up by Greece, and exaggerated by the journals too little or too well informed, kept the Christian populations of Turkey in alarm and on their guard; the moment, also, when the Czechen of Bohemia; urging on in consequence almost all the Sclavians of Austria, protested against the Cisleithan const.i.tution, and refused to sit in the representative chambers of the empire. The _Kremlin_ thus became the _mons sacer_ of the _intransigeans_ of the two banks of the Leitha, the _congress of Moscow_ had all the appearance of an _opposition parliament_ opposed to the Reichsrath of Vienna, and the language held by the authorized organs of the cabinet of St. Petersburg was not calculated to calm the susceptibilities of the interested governments, nor to dissuade vexatious manifestations. Speaking of the pious _pilgrims_ of Turkey and Austria who were preparing to visit Moscow, "that holy Mecca of the Sclavians," the "Correspondance Russe,"

the ministerial journal _par excellence_,[112] thus expressed itself in the month of April, 1867: "One cannot reasonably demand of us that we abjure our past. We will let, then, our guests believe that they have come to a sister nation _from whom they have everything to expect_ and nothing to fear; _we will listen to their grievances_, and the recital of their evils can only tighten the ties which unite us with them. If now they intend to establish a comparison between their political state and ours, _we will not be foolish enough_ to prove to them that they are in the most favorable conditions of Sclavic development. These conditions, we believe, on the contrary, to be bad; we have said so a hundred times, and we can well say so again."

Without doubt the Russian intrigues in the countries of the Danube and the Balkan were not of very recent invention; they even dated back very far in the past, from the reign of the great Catherine. Underhandedly and secretly, the Pan-Sclavic propaganda had been encouraged or protected for nearly a century; but it was for the first time, in this summer of 1867, that the government of St. Petersburg thus loftily a.s.sumed the responsibility of such a propaganda, and unfurled in its states the flags of Saints Cyrille and Methode. In an empire where all is watched, regulated, and commanded from the throne, where nothing is done spontaneously, where all is arranged and _devised_, "foreign Sclavians," subjects of two neighboring and "friendly" Powers, were admitted, encouraged to come to expose their grievances, to bring complaints against their respective governments, to demand a.s.sistance and deliverance in the name of a new right of nations, of a principle lately discovered of great combinations and national unities. _They were not foolish enough_ to dismiss these foreign "deputies," to counsel reason and resignation to them; on the contrary they spoke to them of a "better and approaching condition," they took them through all the cities of the empire amidst enthusiastic manifestations directed by the colonels and archimandrites, they overwhelmed them with testimonies of sympathy, ovations and demonstrations, in which the army, the magistrates, and all the higher official world took part. Generals, admirals, and ministers presided at banquets where the disaster of Sadowa was celebrated as a providential and happy event by the subjects of the Emperor Francis Joseph, where appeals were addressed to the czar "to revenge the secular outrages of the White Mountain and of Kossovo, and to plant the Russian banner on the Dardanelles, and on the basilica of St. Sophia." The shock given by such demonstrations to a whole race, to a whole religious world, was profound and prolonged, and certainly the contemporaneous annals have rarely known a period as _incorrect_ in point of view of international right and of the usages of the chancellors' offices as that which had for its starting point the congress of Moscow and for its end the conference of Paris on the subject of Greece. It was a strange one in truth, this epoch, with such presidents of the council as Ratazzi, Bratiano, Koumondouros, with generalissimos like Garibaldi, Petropoulaki, and "Philip the Bulgarian;" with these expeditions of Mentana, of Sistow, of the _Arcadion_ and _Enosis_; with these agitations, to mention all, German, Italian, Czech, Croatian, Roumanian, Servian, Bulgarian, Grecian, and Pan-Sclavic. Without entering farther into the tiresome history of these complex and not yet explained events, it suffices, in order to appreciate the general character of them and to comprehend their close ties, to re-read with all the attention which it merits the report, already mentioned, of the amba.s.sador of France to the court of Berlin, dated the 5th January, 1868. "M. de Bismarck must have," wrote M.

Benedetti, "a disturbed Italy, in permanent disagreement with France, to constrain us to maintain forces more or less considerable in the States of the Holy See, to be able, if necessary, to excite, by the aid of the revolutionary party, a violent rupture between the government of the emperor and that of King Victor Emmanuel, to neutralize, in a word, our liberty on the Rhine.... And I would not be surprised if M. de Bismarck were the instigator of the new impulse given since last summer to the Pan-Sclavic propaganda; he finds in it the immediate advantage of disturbing Austria by Russia. Russia will a.s.suredly show itself less enterprising, and Prussia on its part will not encourage it (Russia) to renew the question of the Orient, for the simple reason that it itself (Prussia) would gain no advantage in it, if it did not think it indispensable to pay with this price for the liberty which it claims in Germany. The uncertainty of the situation only tightens every day the ties which unite Prussia with Russia and solidifies the ambitions of the one in Germany with those of the other in the Orient."

A _permanent committee for the interests of Sclavic unity_ was formed on the day after the congress of Moscow, under the auspices of a grand duke, and his action was not slow in making itself felt among the Ruthenes, the Czechen, the Croatians of Austria; but it was especially in the tributary or subject provinces of the Ottoman Porte that the agitation became as chronic as it was perilous. The unfortunate Turk was a.s.sailed on all sides: one day it was the Vladika of Montenegro who demanded of him in a menacing tone some port of the Adriatic, another day the Prince of Servia demanded the evacuation of some fortress, enforcing his request with extraordinary armaments. Numerous convoys of arms arrived from Russia in the Danubian Provinces under the false designation of material for the construction of railroads,[113] while the Greek ships of war did not cease to wish to rekindle with all their strength in the isle of Crete an insurrection about to be extinguished and which, in truth, never was of very great extent. It was the epoch of "committees of aid" and "liberating bands" now overrunning the States of the Pope with the cry "_Roma o Morte!_" now making incursions in Thessaly to revenge "the outraged manes of Phocion and Philopoemon," or again freeing five times in the s.p.a.ce of a year the Danube from the side of Roumania only to awaken in the Balkans "the lion with the golden mane!" "To-day it is our duty, brothers, to prove to European diplomacy that descendants of the terrible Krum still exist; the lion with the golden mane and the trumpet of war call you." Thus read in the month of August, 1868, a proclamation dated from the "Balkans," and signed "_Provisional Government_."[114] "It is a fact," wrote on the 6th February, 1868, in a curious report addressed to Count de Beust by the agent of Austria in the Princ.i.p.alities, Baron d'Eder,--"it is a fact that at Bucharest, as in the different cities on the banks of the Danube, there exist Bulgarian committees; their object is to provoke troubles in Bulgaria, to aid them, to give them more extended proportions than those of the past year. Only quite lately they were persuaded here that on the return of pleasant weather serious complications would break out in Occidental Europe which would permit Russia to declare war against Turkey, and, foreseeing these events, they have made preparations to influence with energy the Bulgarian rising.

Although the government of the Princ.i.p.alities is in the hands of a party (radical) traditionally hostile to Russia, it has nevertheless for some time inclined towards this Power, and expects from it the realization of its efforts and its hopes. The journals of the opposition (conservative) combat these Russophile tendencies of the government; they reproach it with acting in concert with Prussia and with preparing difficulties for Austria in case of a conflict between France and Prussia. The journals of the government reply by saying that the national party is from principle the adversary of no Power, and that there is no reason for combating Russia from the moment that this Power defends the cause of right and of oppressed nationalities."

a.s.suredly it would be unjust to throw on the Russian government the responsibility of all the disorderly agitations of this epoch in the Sclavic-Graeco-Roumanian world, but it is not the less true that it did nothing to stop or even disown them. In looking over the parliamentary doc.u.ments of this time,--the different blue, red, green, and yellow books of the years 1867-1869,--one is struck at meeting at every step repeated and energetic representations, addressed by the cabinets of London, of the Tuileries, and of Vienna to Servia, Roumania, and to Greece concerning their military preparations, the clandestine shipments of arms and marauding bands, while the cabinets of St. Petersburg and Berlin carefully abstained from any proceeding of this sort. By a piquant change of things here below, which must have astonished the Nesselrode and the Kamptz in their heavenly abode, the Occidental Powers now, England and France, to whom also Austria joined itself, denounced to the world the revolutionary practices of the European demagogic party, while Prussia kept silent, and Russia refused to deny the fact or to plead extenuating circ.u.mstances for it. The excuses for the government of Athens Prince Gortchakof kindly found in the h.e.l.lenic const.i.tution: "This const.i.tution," said he, "gives to all Greeks full liberty to leave their own country and to take part in any conflict such as existed in Crete;"[115] and that was truly an original spectacle, that of a minister of an autocracy displaying before an old whig like Lord Clarendon the inexorable conditions of a parliamentary and legal _regime_. The Porte, it will be remembered, wished to know nothing of a legality which destroyed it; it ended by losing patience, by addressing an _ultimatum_ to the government of Athens, and a conference a.s.sembled at Paris "to seek for means to smooth over the difference between Turkey and Greece." Some good people apprehended an embarra.s.sed att.i.tude on the part of the Russian chancellor before such areopagus, they even believed him capable of trammeling the labors of this reunion: this was to ignore the resources of a mind as crafty as cultivated, and which profited by the occasion to venture his famous _mot_ on Saturn. "I remember," he wrote to Baron Brunnow, at London, 13th January, 1869, "that there are some persons who accuse Russia of wishing to render the conference abortive. One is not ignorant that the conference emanates from the mind of the emperor. The fable of Saturn has no application in the wanderings of the policy of the imperial cabinet." Alexander Mikhalovitch was not at the end of his boldness; he became bitter, almost aggressive; he spoke of the "excitement from without," of a "process of progress," of the "distrust which was attached to every step of Russia," and went so far as to denounce a great conspiracy contrived by the Occidental Powers against the peace of the Levant. "It is impossible for us not to remark," he said, in a dispatch to Baron de Brunnow, of the 17th December, 1868, "that this discordant note is not the only one which has come to _disturb the echoes of the Orient_. It is thus that we have first seen Servia become the end in view of an agitation which, originated with the press, ended by gaining over diplomacy; Prince Michael Obrenovitch was suspected, and nothing less than his tragic end was necessary to disarm the hostilities directed against him. Soon after, accusations were directed against the government of the united Princ.i.p.alities: the Bulgarian bands became a motive for incrimination, it was reproached with having tolerated them, it was accused with having encouraged them. This complication was scarcely removed, before a new crisis arose in the relations of Turkey with Greece, a crisis still more grave and more dangerous to the general peace." Decidedly, in absence of the "fable of Saturn," that of the wolf and the lamb had its application in the wanderings of the policy of the imperial cabinet of St.

Petersburg.

The conference of Paris succeeded, nevertheless, in its efforts; the Graeco-Turkish difference was smoothed over, and with the spring of the year 1869 the cold wind of the propaganda whistled less strongly in the valleys of the Danube and the gorges of the Balkan. There was a sort of lull; but the combustible matters still remained heaped up, ready to catch fire from the first spark. The radicals of Roumania were not the only ones to foresee an offensive action of Russia in the Orient as soon as serious complications should break out in Occidental Europe; that was an almost universal conviction, and one which the children of Rourik shared the very first. The end of the year 1869 was signaled by an incident which did not fail to gravely impress all serious minds. They celebrated at St. Petersburg the centennial of the inst.i.tution of the Order of St. George, the great military order of Russia, and of which the first cla.s.s is only conferred on him who gains a brilliant victory.

The Emperor Alexander II. sent this distinction to King William I., to the conqueror of Sadowa and the former champion of 1814. "Accept it," he telegraphed him, "as a new proof of the friendship which unites us, a friendship founded on the souvenir of that great epoch when our united armies fought for a sacred cause which was common to us." And the King of Prussia soon replied by telegraph: "Profoundly touched, and _with tears in my eyes_, I thank you for the honor which you have done me, and which I did not expect; but what pleases me still more are the expressions by which you have announced it to me. I see, in truth, in these expressions a new proof of your friendship and your remembrance of the great epoch when our united armies fought for the same sacred cause."[116]

At the commencement of the same year, and while the conference of Paris was still sitting, there died at Nice a faithful servant of the sultan's, one of the last great statesmen of Turkey. Before descending into the tomb, Fuad-Pacha traced with a faltering hand a memorial for his august master, which he said was his political testament. The doc.u.ment was to remain secret, and, in fact, only came to light quite recently.[117] "When this writing is placed before the eyes of your majesty," one reads in it, "I will no longer be in this world. You can therefore listen to me without distrust, and you should imbue yourself with this great and grievous truth, that _the Empire of the Osmanlis is in danger_." And after having reviewed the different states of the Continent, and marked out the conflict more or less near, but inevitable, between France and Prussia, Fuad-Pacha concluded by these words: "An intestine dissension in Europe, and _a Bismarck in Russia_, and the face of the world will be changed."

III.

G.o.d alone could contemplate his finished work, and say "that it was good;" our poor humanity rarely tastes such a pure enjoyment, and the _party of action_ in the councils of the second empire scarcely experienced it in consequence of the events of 1866, which it had so powerfully contributed to create. The amba.s.sador of France at the court of Berlin was among the number of the disabused; the achievement of Italian unity only consoled him, very imperfectly in truth, for the profound blow which the calamity of Sadowa had given his own country.

His disenchantment was great; but there is nothing like a great and grievous deception to sharpen and refine a mind naturally sagacious; and if Pascal has spoken of a second ignorance, that which comes after knowledge, there is also for certain diplomats a second knowledge, and like a second sight after a pa.s.sing blindness. One cannot praise too highly the eminent qualities of observation and of judgment which M.

Benedetti showed during the last four years of his emba.s.sy at Berlin, and, for this epoch of 1867 to 1870, history will fully confirm the testimony which he once thought proper to testify of himself, while protesting before his chief,[118] that during his mission in Prussia he had been "an active, correct, and far-seeing agent."

From 1867, in fact, the amba.s.sador worked with patriotic zeal to enlighten his government on the state of affairs in Europe, and to advise it to make a strong resolution, either to resign itself frankly to the inevitable, or to prepare in good time for a conflict very imminent and full of great perils. He represented Prussia as working without cessation to unite all Germany, at the risk of provoking a conflict with France, inclining only too often to consider such a conflict as the surest and most direct means of arriving at its ends. In such a case, he guarded against giving them the least hope from the _particularists_ of the South. "At the beginning of a national war," he said, "the most obstinate among them will only be extinguished by the ma.s.ses who will regard the struggle, whatever may be the circ.u.mstances in the midst of which it will break out, as a war of aggression of France against their country; and if the fortune of arms were favorable to them, their demands would know no limits." He also noticed "the most active propaganda" which M. de Bismarck maintained in the countries the other side of the Main: "With the exception of some journals in the pay of the governments (of Munich and Stuttgart), or belonging to the ultra-radical party, the press seconds him in all the Southern States."

He also sent word to Paris that the minister of William I. continued his negotiations with the revolutionary party in Italy; that he received agents of Garibaldi, unknown to the regular government of King Victor Emmanuel, the personal friend of the Emperor Napoleon III., who, at the time of the complications of Mentana, had only sounded Prussia in order to know "in what measure it could lend it its aid."[119] He was also the first to give warning concerning the shadowy practices with Prim and the Spanish candidature of the Hohenzollern. Lastly, one has already seen that he had recognized from the beginning the alarming character and true bearing of the mission of General Manteuffel to Russia.

"However difficult it may be for a great country like France to trace in advance its line of conduct in the actual state of things," said M.

Benedetti to his government at the beginning of the year 1868, "and however great may be the part which it expects to take in unforeseen contingencies, the union of Germany under a military government strongly organized, and which in certain respects has of parliamentary _regime_ only external forms, const.i.tutes, however, a fact which touches too closely our national security to allow us to dispense with preparations, and to solve, without longer delay, the following question: Would such an event endanger the independence or the position of France in Europe, and would not this danger be conjured up only by war? If the government of the emperor thinks that France has nothing to fear from such a radical alteration in the relations of the states situated in the centre of the Continent, it will be desirable, in my opinion, in the interest of the maintenance of peace and public prosperity, to shape entirely and without reserve our att.i.tude according to this conviction. If the contrary opinion is entertained, let us prepare for war without cessation, and let us be well a.s.sured in advance of what aid Austria can be to us; let us shape our conduct so as to solve one after the other the questions of the Orient and that of Italy; all our united forces will not be too great to render us victorious on the Rhine."

Especially in his manner of judging of the accord established between the two courts of Berlin and St. Petersburg, M. Benedetti showed a justness and superiority of judgment truly remarkable. He had the merit of foreseeing the understanding from the first moment, and of positively believing in it until the last. In the month of September, 1869, the Emperor of the French had thought of appointing as amba.s.sador to the czar one of his most intimate friends, one of his most devoted cooperators of the 2d December, a general renowned for his bravery and intelligence, a grand equerry. It was sufficient to indicate that they wished to enter into relations as intimate and direct as possible, and in spite of the exchange of telegrams at the festival of St. George, they were already, at the beginning of the year 1870, full of hope; they believed that _the affair was progressing of itself_.[120] The French general, an able man, however, was very quickly taken to the bear hunts, to journeys on sledges, and shown many other marks of august kindness, which he had the modesty to credit to the policy of his master, in place of attributing them with much more reason to his very real and in truth very fascinating personal charms. The conviction of the grand equerry was shared by those surrounding him, especially by his aides-de-camp, who did not delay to praise in their confidential letters addressed to Paris, "the great results obtained" by their chief, and to speak of "his growing favor with the Emperor of all the Russias," in terms very strong and much more military than diplomatic.[121] Without being imposed upon by all these recitals, full of cheerfulness, M. Benedetti did not the less persist in his well founded conviction; even on the 30th June, 1870, on the very eve of the war, he expressed it in a lucid dispatch, from which we will have more than one instructive pa.s.sage to quote.

Speaking of the recent interview (1st-4th June) of the Emperor Alexander and the King of Prussia at Ems, the amba.s.sador supposes that M. de Bismarck had shown himself then, as generally, on one side favorable to the policy of the cabinet of St. Petersburg in the Orient, and that on the other he endeavored to excite the susceptibility of the czar in the questions which agitate the national sentiment in Russia as regards Austria, Galicia, etc. "While the minister will have undertaken to rea.s.sure the emperor on the first of these two points and to alarm him on the other, the king will have displayed that good grace of which he has always known how to make such a marvelous use to capture the sympathies of his august nephew, and I do not doubt, for my part, that they have left impressions in conformity with his desire. But whatever may have been the means which they employed, their object must have been to strengthen the emperor in the sentiments which they have been able to inspire in him, and they have attained it more or less."

M. Benedetti was, however, far from admitting an official arrangement drawn up in due form between the two courts, and above all far from believing that the minister of Prussia had in all sincerity and candor made the cession and abandonment of the Oriental heritage to the hands of his former colleague of Frankfort, and it is precisely in such estimates that the uncommon perspicacity of the French diplomat shows itself. M. de Bismarck could for the necessities of the moment, simulate indifference regarding the affairs of the Levant, affirm that he "never read the correspondence of Constantinople," and even consider the pretensions of Russia "to introduce a certain unity in the intellectual development of the Sclavians, legitimate;"[122] but the extreme care which he used at the same time to maintain the most intimate relations with the Hungarians, his allies of 1866, should have already enlightened the zealots of Moscow concerning the inanity of their dream of a division of the world between the sons of Teut and those of Rourik. "The Hungarians regard us, us Prussians, as their mediate protectors against Vienna in the future," wrote, in a confidential dispatch, Baron de Werther in the month of June, 1867, on his return from the coronation of Buda, to rea.s.sure the cabinet of Berlin on the recent enthusiasm of the Magyars reconciled with their "king;" it is not only against Vienna, it is still much more against Moscow and St. Petersburg, against any Sclavic preponderance on the banks of the Danube, that the children of Arpad will in the future have aid from the Hohenzollern. "Prussia has no rightful interests in the Orient," M. de Bismarck was pleased to say in the years 1867-1870, and the organ of M. de Katkof did not cease to repeat this remark so often commented on; but from the day when Prussia identified itself with Germany, or rather incorporated itself in it, it remained charged, under pain of forfeiture, with the Germanic interests and influences in the countries of the Danube and of the Balkan, and the interest then became greater, much greater, than that of France and England.

All this was very well understood by the amba.s.sador of France to the court of Berlin, and from time to time keenly exposed in the dispatches which he addressed to his government during the last years of his mission in Prussia. Writing, in his report of the 5th January, 1868, of the complaisance with which the chancellor of the confederation of the North always lent himself to the views of Prince Gortchakof, M.

Benedetti added, however: "He (M. de Bismarck) persuades himself without doubt that other Powers have an interest of the first order in preserving the Ottoman empire from the covetousness of Russia, and he abandons the care of it to them; he knows, moreover, that _nothing can be definitely accomplished there without the aid or the adhesion of Germany, if Germany is united and strong_; he believes, then, that he can, for the present, and without peril, himself sharpen the ambition of the cabinet of St. Petersburg, provided that he obtains in return for this condescension a kind withdrawal from everything which he undertakes in Germany."

"In the Orient," wrote the amba.s.sador some time after (4th February, 1868), "M. de Bismarck is careful to preserve a position which does not bind him in any way, and permits him, according to the necessities of his own designs, to give the hand to Russia, or to ally himself with Occidental Powers; but he can only preserve this position by abstaining from any proceeding which would compromise him with the friends or the adversaries of Turkey." This reasoning was not long in being fully justified by the att.i.tude of Prussia, during the conference of Paris, on the subject of Greece (January, 1869). The cabinet of Berlin did not share in the ardor of Alexander Mikhalovitch; it did not defend, as he did, persecuted innocence in the person of "the young Roumania," and of the Servian _Omladina_, and above all was careful to denounce the great conspiracy of England, France, and Austria against the peace of the Levant. In reality the minister of Prussia did not wish the death of the just Osmanli, still less the collapse of Hungary, the advance guard of the Germanic "mission" in the East;[123] and his sympathies for a "certain ideal unity" of the Sclavians grew cold in proportion as the hour of the real unity of Germany approached. "Any conflict in the Orient will put it under the influence of Russia," wrote the French diplomat the 27th January, 1870, "and he will seek to excite it; he tried it last year at the beginning of the Graeco-Turkish trouble.

_Russia is a card in his game_ for the eventualities which may arise on the Rhine, _and he is particularly careful not to change the roles_, not to become himself a card in the game of the cabinet of St. Petersburg."

Some months after, on the very eve of the war with France (30th June, 1870), M. Benedetti, while thinking that the ties between Russia and Prussia could only have been drawn closer in the recent interview of Ems, concluded by the following observations: "It must not be supposed, however, that M. de Bismarck thinks it opportune to connect his policy closely with that of the Russian cabinet. In my opinion, he has not contracted and is not disposed to make any engagement which might, while compromising Prussia in the complications of which Turkey will become the scene, draw France and England closer together, and create difficulties for him or weaken him on the Rhine. The kind feelings of the chancellor of the confederation of the North for Russia will never be of a nature to limit his liberty of action; _he promises in fact more than he means to do_, or, in other words, he seeks the alliance with the cabinet of St. Petersburg to gain for himself the benefit of it in case of a conflict in the Occident, but with the well-fixed resolution never to engage the resources or the forces of Germany in the Orient. I have also always been persuaded that no official arrangement has been concluded between the two courts, and we can certainly believe that they did not consider that at Ems."

Everything, in fact, leads us to believe that neither a treaty was signed there, nor conditions discussed; the commonalty of views and the harmony of hearts dispensed with a fatiguing discussion of details.

Moreover, it would have been very difficult, in all the useless cases, to make stipulations _en regle_ for the eventualities, the time of whose appearance is not known, of which it is impossible to calculate the distant consequences, or even the immediate effects. They contented themselves with the conviction that they had no opposite interests; that, on the contrary, they were congenial and sympathetic, and that it was understood that at the propitious moment each one would be for himself and G.o.d for all. It must also be acknowledged that the Russians, in their views concerning the Orient, are not exempt from certain _mirages_. Europe credits them with much more method than they have in reality: the sentiment is profound and tenacious, but the plans are as wavering as they are different and vague. One might say that this great people suffer in this regard rather from a fascination and almost a fatality which prevents them from pursuing a systematic conquest; it advances on the phantom which possesses it only to make