As the direct capture of the Straits was bound to raise diplomatic difficulties, Nicholas I, on September 4, 1892, summoned a secret council to discuss what policy Russia was to pursue on this point. The opinion which prevailed was expressed in a memorandum drawn up by a former diplomatist, Dimitri Dashkov, then Minister of Justice, and in a draft partition of the Turkish Empire penned by a Greek, Capodistria. This secret committee, dreading the opposition of the Western States, decided to postpone the partition lest, as Great Britain and France refused their consent, it should not finally benefit the designs of Russia and Greece on Constantinople. These secret debates have been summed up in a book published in 1877;[47] and M. Goriainov, in the book he wrote on this question in 1910,[48] thought it proper to praise the consistent magnanimity of the Tsars towards the Turks—whereas the policy which maintained that no reforms would ever be instituted by Turkey of her own free-will if they were not urged on by diplomatic intrigues or international interference, and that “the sick man” could only be restored to health by the intervention of Christendom and under the Orthodox tutelage, was the real cause of the decay of Turkey and the origin of all the intricacies of the Eastern problem.
In 1830 Lord Holland, Fox’s nephew—it will be remembered that on March 29, 1791, Fox had said in the House of Commons he was proud of supporting Russia’s advance to the East, in opposition to William Pitt, who wanted to admit Turkey into the European concert—declared he was sorry, as “a citizen of the world,” that the Russians had not yet settled down in the Golden Horn.
Besides, whereas the Tories felt some anxiety at the territorial development of Russia—without thinking of making use of Turkey to consolidate the position in the East—the Whigs, on the contrary, to use the words of Sir Robert Adair in 1842, thought they could bring the Muscovite Empire into the wake of the United Kingdom.
In June, 1844, the Tsar himself came to London in order to induce Great Britain to approve his Eastern policy, and Russian diplomacy felt so confident she could rely on the support of the English Liberal Cabinet that in 1853 Nicholas I, in the overtures made to Sir Hamilton Seymour, expressed his conviction that he could settle the Turkish problem in ten minutes’ conversation with Lord Aberdeen.
On June 4, 1878, Lord Beaconsfield, who looked upon the part of England in the East as that of a moral protectorate over Islam and a mediator between Europe and Asia, by ensuring the institution of a system of reforms, signed a treaty of alliance with Turkey, by which England pledged herself to protect the Porte against Russian greediness in Asia. Unfortunately, Mr. Gladstone, under the influence of the ideas we have already expounded,[49] soon reversed the Eastern policy of England and unconsciously made his country the Tsar’s ally against Turkey.
Russia, to whom it was now impossible, since the Bulgarians and Rumanians were no longer under Ottoman dominion, to reach the shores of the Bosphorus through Thrace and to conquer Constantinople and the Straits, which had been the aim of her policy for centuries, then turned her designs towards Turkish Armenia and Anatolia, as we have just seen, in order to reach Constantinople through Asia.
Tiutshev, in one of his poems entitled Russian Geography, said:
“Moscow, Peter’s town, and Constantine’s town, are the three sacred capitals of the Russian Empire. But how far do its frontiers extend to the north and the east, to the south and the west? Fate will reveal it in the future. Seven inland seas and seven great rivers, from the Nile to the Neva, from the Elbe to China, from the Volga to the Euphrates, from the Ganges to the Danube—this is the Russian Empire, and it will last through untold centuries! So did the Spirit predict. So did Daniel prophesy!”
And in another place: