II
The courses open to the British Government in the face of the circular were these. They might silently or with a protest acquiesce. Or they might declare an offensive war (much deprecated by Turkey herself) against a nation that had peculiar advantages for defence, and for an object that every other signatory power thought in itself a bad object. Third, they might, in accordance with a wonderfully grand scheme suggested to ministers, demand from Germany, all flushed as she was with military pride, to tell us plainly whether she was on our side or Russia's; and if the German answer did not please us, then we should make an offensive alliance with France, Austria, Italy, and Turkey checking Russia in the east and Germany in the west. A fourth plan was mutely to wait, on the plea that whatever Russia might have said, nothing had been done. The fifth plan was a conference. This was hardly heroic enough to please everybody in the cabinet. At least it saved us from the insanity of a war that would have intensified European confusion, merely to maintain restraints considered valuable by nobody. The expedient of a conference was effectively set in motion by Bismarck, then pre-occupied in his critical Bavarian treaty and the siege of Paris. On November 12, Mr. Odo Russell left London for Versailles on a special mission to the Prussian king. The intrepidity of our emissary soon secured a remarkable success, and the episode of Bismarck's intervention in the business was important.
Bismark's Action
Mr. Odo Russell had three hours' conversation with Count Bismarck on November 21. Bismarck told him that the Russian circular had taken him by surprise; that though he had always thought the treaty of 1856 too hard upon Russia, he entirely disapproved both of the manner and time chosen for forcing on a revision of it; that he could not [pg 353] interfere nor even answer the circular, but to prevent the outbreak of another war he would recommend conferences at Constantinople.[225] The conversation broke off at four o'clock in the afternoon, with this unpromising cast. At ten in the evening it was resumed; it was prolonged until half an hour beyond midnight. “I felt I knew him better,” Mr. Russell in an unofficial letter tells Lord Granville (Nov. 30), “and could express more easily all that I had determined to say to convince him that unless he could get Russia to withdraw the circular, we should be compelled with or without allies to go to war.” Bismarck remained long obstinate in his professed doubts of England going to war; but he gradually admitted the truth of the consequences to which a pacific acceptance of “the Russian kick must inevitably lead. And so he came round to the British point of view, and felt that in our place he could not recede.”
It was not hard to see Bismarck's interests. The mischief to Germany of another European war before Paris had fallen; the moral support to be derived by the Tours government from a revival of the old Anglo-French alliance; the chances of Beust and other persons fishing in the troubled waters of an extended European conflict; the vital importance of peace to the reconstruction of Germany—these were the disadvantages to his own country and policy, of a war between England and Russia; these worked the change in his mind between afternoon and midnight, and led him to support the cause of England and peace against Gortchakoff and his circular. Characteristically, at the same time he strove hard to drive a bargain with the English agent, and to procure some political advantages in exchange for his moral support. “In politics,” he said, “one hand should wash the other” [pg 354] (eine Hand die andere waschen muss). In Mr. Odo Russell, however, he found a man who talked the language, kept the tone and was alive to all the arts of diplomatic business, and no handwashing followed. When Mr. Russell went to his apartment in the Place Hoche at Versailles that night, he must have felt that he had done a good day's work.
In the following year, papers were laid before parliament, and attention was drawn to the language used by Mr. Russell to Bismarck, in the pregnant sentence about the question being of a nature in its present state to compel us with or without allies, to go to war with Russia.[226] Mr. Gladstone, when directly challenged, replied (Feb. 16) that the agent had used this argument without specific authority or instruction from the government, but that the duty of diplomatic agents required them to express themselves in the mode in which they think they can best support the proposition of which they wish to procure acceptance. Mr. Odo Russell explained to Mr. Gladstone (Feb. 27) that he was led to use the argument about England being compelled to go to war with or without allies by these reasons: that we were bound by a definite treaty to regard any retractation of the stipulations of March 30, 1856, as a cause of war;[227] that Gortchakoff's assumption of a right to renounce provisions directly touching Russian interests seemed to carry with it the assumption of a right to renounce all the rest of the treaty; that Mr. Gladstone's government had declared (Nov. 10) that it was impossible to sanction the course announced by Gortchakoff; that, therefore, France being otherwise engaged, and Austria being unprepared, we might be compelled by our joint and several obligations under the tripartite treaty, to go to war with Russia for proceedings that we pronounced ourselves unable to sanction; finally, that he had never been instructed to state to Prussia, that the question was not one compelling us ever to go to war, notwithstanding our treaty engagements. What was Mr. Gladstone's reply to this I do not find, but Lord Granville [pg 355] had very sensibly written to him some weeks before (Dec. 8, 1870):—
I am afraid our whole success has been owing to the belief that we would go to war, and to tell the truth, I think that war in some shape or other, sooner or later, was a possible risk after our note. In any case, I would reassure nobody now. Promising peace is as unwise as to threaten war. A sort of instinct that the bumps of combativeness and destructiveness are to be found somewhere in your head, has helped us much during the last five months.