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spread in the sight of any bird.' The people of this country have come to realise that the ownership of Constantinople is not a British interest, however much it may be an Austrian interest; and that, in any case, there is no difficulty which need keep England and Russia apart, or England and France either. A leading French paper the other day suggested that France might seek in Syria her compensation for the British occupation of Egypt. Why should she not? England is not likely to oppose her. In short, everything points to a new grouping of the Powers, based on a friendly understanding between England, Russia, France, and Italy.

CHAPTER VIII.

PRECEDENTS FOR SEPARATE ACTION.

I INSERT the following letter not only in fairness to Mr. Greenwood, but also in order to emphasise Lord Salisbury's service both to England and Russia on that occasion.

To the Editor of the DAILY CHRONICLE.' SIR,-Canon MacColl, in an article printed in this morning's Daily Chronicle, says that I am still a believer in the possibility of keeping Russia down.' Since Canon MacColl must have read that article of mine from which he makes a meanly garbled extract (see the Pall Mall Gazette of September 16), I cannot imagine him unaware that this is not my case. whole tenor and purpose of what I wrote, its intention and meaning in every line, is to the following effect:-Russia cannot be kept down ; her ascendency over England and Europe-but particularly over England-is complete; and the last chance of keeping Russia out of the dictatorship which she now holds was lost when Disraeli's policy of 1877-78 was disallowed by

The

Lord Beaconsfield's Policy

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his colleagues. Just where I say this Mr. MacColl's extract leaves off. Allow me to follow him with a few sentences from where he

stops. 'Disraeli's anxiety was to prevent in 1878 what was fully accomplished in 1895, the absolute predominance of Russia in Europe and the East too. . . . His motive was the postponement to a far future of the dictatorship which England is now compelled to acknowledge. What is unintelligently called bolstering up the Turkish Empire was the seizing of an opportunity of rolling back the half-crippled Russian armies in ruin, breaking down the Russian prestige in Asia, and therewith destroying all idea of Russian ascendency for many a decade.' And then I say that no doubt Disraeli saw that this opportunity, if lost, would be the last,' and that it was the last. Europe must be turned topsy-turvy before another recurs.

So far, then, from believing it still possible to keep Russia down,' I complain that she has been allowed a position of absolute mastery which there is no present hope of shaking. What Canon MacColl dislikes, I fancy, is the further explanation that if Disraeli's policy had been permitted, and had been fairly successful, there would have been no Russian dictatorship in Turkey, and, at any rate for the present, no Russian mastery in Europe. To England would have been restored the most commanding voice at the Porte.' Nor can Mr. MacColl, in his

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heart, think that policy wrong which, had it been allowed, would have forestalled the Russian dictatorship under which the Armenians perish and the Sultan is shielded.' Or if he do think it wrong, how much the dictatorship must please him!

Trusting to your sense of fairness to print this answer to what you can see for yourself is an entirely unwarrantable misrepresentation, I am, your obedient servant,

September 25.

FREDERICK GREENWOOD.

I have too much respect not only for Mr. Greenwood's honesty and ability, but for the prudential rules of controversy, to lay myself wilfully open to the charge of 'entirely unwarrantable misrepresentation.' The truth is that I cut out as much of Mr. Greenwood's article as included even more than he has quoted in his letter to the Daily Chronicle. But finding that my article extended to such a length that I could find no room for my full quotation, I gave what I believed to be the gist of it, and gave also the reference to the number of the Pall Mall Gazette which contained the article, in order that the honesty of my quotation might be tested. I regarded Mr. Greenwood's opinion that the defeat of Mr. Disraeli's policy in 1877 had established for the future the absolute

predominance of Russia in Europe and the East too' as a rhetorical exaggeration rather than the expression of his deliberate conviction. And I had more than surmise to guide me to that conclusion. For long after 1877-down to this very year, in fact-Mr. Greenwood has been urging this country to join the Triple Alliance, in order to prevent that predominance of Russia which he now tells us was irretrievably established by Lord Salisbury's defeat of Lord Beaconsfield's plot against Russia in 1877. cannot see, then, that I have done him any injustice. As a matter of fact, Russia is not nearly as predominant in Europe now as she was from 1848 to the Crimean War.

I

But I must say a word on this scheme of 'seizing an opportunity of rolling back the half-crippled Russian armies in ruin, breaking down the Russian prestige in Asia, and therewith destroying all idea of Russian ascendency for many a decade.' England was to have achieved this easy triumph over a high-spirited nation of (at that time) 100,000,000 of human beings, and with no other ally than Abdul the Damned.' Napoleon tried that achievement with an army incomparably greater than any that England and Turkey could have put into the field, and failed disastrously. Has Mr. Greenwood forgotten that it took the combined military and naval forces of England, France, Sardinia, and Turkey more than two years to