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Ottoman Empire' and the balance of power,' was the argument that we may call the Liberal' argument. The war feeling in England was created by the Whig leaders, especially by Palmerston, and by the Daily News and the Radical press, followed by the Tories who hated the peace-loving Aberdeen as the representative of Peel.1 The feeling against Russia drew its origin from a healthy dislike of despotism, prevalent among the English middle class during the Victorian era. The congenital lunatic in Tennyson's 'Maud,' who represents the spirit of the Crimean War party in all its aspects, loves war for its own sake and rebukes the 'love of peace that was full of wrongs and shames,' and expects to cure our social evils by a regimen of war fever and war taxation; he is deeply shocked by the moral turpitude of the peace party led by John Bright,

"This broad-brimm'd hawker of holy things,

Whose ear is cramm'd with his cotton, and rings
Even in dreams to the chink of his pence';

but he also hates the Czar for more sensible reasons, disliking that

'An infant civilisation be ruled with rod or with knout,'

and he is determined to wage war in order

'That an iron tyranny now should bend or cease.'

The feeling against despotism was directed against Russia rather than against Turkey, because Russia had helped Austria to suppress the Hungarians in 1849, and Turkey had sheltered Kossuth and the Hungarian refugees.2 This seemed, though it was not, a good reason for Liberals to fight for the Turk.

It is indeed true that an unexpected by-result of the Crimean War helped the cause of liberty. Austria, by remaining neutral, incurred the resentment of Russia on the one side and of England and France on the other; she was therefore left

1 Greville Memoirs, September 26, 1853. Day after day the Radical and Tory papers, animated by very different sentiments and motives, pour forth the most virulent abuse of the Emperor of Russia, of Austria, and of this Government, especially of Aberdeen.'

'October 4, 1853. Palmerston is lauded to the skies by all the Radicals who are admirers of Kossuth and Mazzini, who want to renew the scenes and attempts of 1848, and who fancy that if Palmerston were at the head of the Government he would play into their hands.'

*July 9, 1854. The Tories, agreeing in nothing else, concur with the Radicals in hating Aberdeen because he represents the Peel party, and is Minister as the successor of Sir Robert Peel, for whose memory their hatred is as intense as it was for his person when he was alive.'

See p. 188 above.

P

friendless when the Italian question came up again in 1859-60. And Cavour's astute alliance of Piedmont with France and England, half-way through the Crimean War, prepared the way for the liberation of Italy. But although the Crimean War by chance helped Italy to obtain freedom, it was not because our statesmen had succeeded in their policy, but because they had failed. For they tried hard to obtain as their ally in the Crimea, not Piedmont, but Austria, the tyrant of Italy and of Hungary. If France and England had succeeded in their prolonged efforts to induce Austria to join in the attack on Russia, no more sympathy with Italy and Hungary would have been permitted in Downing Street or Paris for the next generation. By the greatest good fortune Austria remained neutral, so that in the end the Crimean War was by chance of some use to somebody-namely, to Cavour. It is an ill wind that blows no one any good. But it was not for the freedom of Italians or Magyars, but for the enslavement of Greeks and Bulgarians, that our troops were sent to fight. 'Our countrymen,' Bright wrote to a public meeting in April 1854,

'our countrymen fancy they are fighting for freedom because the Russian Government is a despotism: they forget that the object of their solicitude is no less a despot: that their chief ally [Napoleon III.] but the other day overthrew a republic, and imprisoned or expatriated the members of a freely-elected Parliament; that they are alternately coaxing and bullying Austria, whose regard for freedom and justice Hungary and Italy can attest, to join them in this holy war, and that the chief result of their success, if success be possible, will be to perpetuate the domination of a handful of the followers of Mahomet over many millions of Christians throughout the provinces of European Turkey. . . . The people, or a portion of them, are drunk with a confused notion of fighting with Russia; they confound the blowing up of ships and the slaughter of thousands with the cause of freedom, as if there were any connection in matters wholly apart.'

The infamous treatment of Poland was quoted by the war party to excite hatred against the Czar. But when in 1855 Napoleon III. vaguely proposed to extend the operations of war to Poland, our Government shrank back with not unnatural alarm from so vast an undertaking. Indeed, Lord Palmerston characterised the idea of helping Poland as

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'positive madness.' Both he and Russell, to the disgust of their Radical supporters, denied that the war was to benefit either the Poles or the Hungarians. The other country besides Turkey for whom the Ministers declared that we were fighting was-not Italy, still less England—but ‘Germany,' who herself refused to enter into the quarrel. 'Be it remembered,' said Lord John, that we are seeking no object of our own. The cause is one, in the first place, of the independence of Turkey. It is to maintain the independence not only of Turkey, but of Germany and of all European nations.'

John Bright (June 1855) seized hold of this extraordinary utterance:

'To me,' he said, 'it was really frightful to hear the noble Lord tell the House that we are not fighting for ourselves, but for Germany. .. What a notion a man must have of the duties of the twenty-seven millions of people living in these islands, if he thinks they ought to come forward as the defenders of the sixty millions of people in Germany, that the blood of England is not the property of the people of England, and that the sacred treasure of the bravery, resolution, and unfaltering courage of the people of England is to be squandered in a contest in which the noble Lord says we have no interest, for the preservation of the independence of Germany, and of the integrity, civilisation, and something else of all Europe.' His final summary of the whole issue, at the end of his 'letter to Mr. Absalom Watkin' 1 (November 1854), is a fine example of rhetoric as the handmaid of argument.

'My doctrine would have been non-intervention in this case. The danger of the Russian power was a phantom; the necessity of permanently upholding the Mahometan rule in Europe is an absurdity. Our love for civilisation, when we subject the Greeks and Christians to the Turks, is a sham; and our sacrifices for freedom, when working out the behests of the Emperor of the French and coaxing Austria to help us, is a pitiful imposture. The evils of nonintervention were remote and vague, and could neither be weighed nor described in any accurate terms. The good we can judge something of already, by estimating the cost of a contrary policy. And what is that cost? War in the north [Baltic] and south of Europe, threatening

1 See p. 220 above.