FRASER'S MAGAZINE. JANUARY 1871. THE ON THE CAUSES OF THE CRIMEAN WAR. HE recent behaviour of Russia in announcing that she does not intend to keep the solemn engagements made by her in 1856 in order to obtain a peace that delivered her from intolerable suffering and threatening dangers-has naturally excited great disquietude. At the same time it has given currency to very erroneous representations of the causes of our war with Russia, by which those who have come to manhood since it was fought are liable to be deceived. A survey of those events seems therefore to be not untimely. The rise of Russia to the rank of a Power pre-eminently great and formidable to Europe was brought about by her absorption of Poland. The dominion of the Polish monarchy reached to the mouth of the Dnieper on the Black Sea, and to the Gulf of Livonia on the Baltic. Its eastern boundary went even beyond the Dnieper, including the Palatinates of Witepsk and Moghilev, making Smolensko the Russian frontier. The Eastern league afterwards known as ( the Holy Alliance' was really made when Russia, Prussia, and Austria combined to appropriate Polish territory. The theatre of war was too distant for Western Europe to reach. France was sinking towards decrepitude, England was quarrelling with her American colonies. VOL. III. NO. XIII.-NEW SERIES. Presently France fell into a terrible revolution, and England was preoccupied by watching her agonies. Spain was effete, and Italy priestridden. Russia therefore was enabled to carry out her daring game, and take to herself the chief spoil, while bribing Austria and Prussia by portions large enough to implicate them in the common crime. The French Revolution induced the Germany had begun it, England war of Europe against France. appeared that French enthusiasm had applauded it; but it soon too much for them. The allies and the genius of Bonaparte were Russia; and only by her aid, and were glad to call in the aid of after the French retreat from Mosfine French ambition to its own cow, were they able at last to consoil. Of course that was no time for us to complain of Russian enwas an amiable man, who professed croachment: moreover, Alexander I. constitutional doctrines and Evangelical religion. Nevertheless on the fall of Napoleon a severe shock was at once given by Russia to the feelings of her allies. been allowed or requested during She had the war to occupy Finland and the duchy of Warsaw for military convenience. At its close she refused to go out; and without a new war, to expel her was impossible. At such bad faith well might statesmen be : the interest of Greece, but the interests of Europe. compen appalled yet it was agreed to let her keep Finland, and to sate' Sweden by giving Norway to her at the expense of Denmark, who (as having been an ally of France) might decorously be plundered. But to concede the duchy of Warsaw to Russia was very offensive to Austria and Prussia; and a war against Russia was acually impending in 1815, when Napoleon broke loose from Elba. He found in the Tuileries the secret correspondence between the allies against Russia, and sent copies of it to the Emperor Alexander, saying in effect, See what your allies are planning! Be rather my ally, and I will consent to your keeping Warsaw.' But Alexander preferred another policy. He showed to his allies the offer of Napoleon, as if to ask on which side they desired to have him. Thus pressed, they were forced to purchase him by acquiescing in his demands. It was a terrible warning to the two weaker members of the Holy Alliance of what stuff their mighty leader was made. The Holy Alliance proceeded to root up constitutional government in the two states in which it had been established by English counsel and aid-in Sicily and in Spain. Naples, by secret treaty with Austria, gladly undertook the first; the Holy Alliance sent French armies to execute the second. Lord Castlereagh's rival, Mr. Canning, becoming Foreign Minister of England, separated us publicly from all complicity in the dealings of the Holy Alliance, and protested in vain at Verona, by the mouth of the Duke of Wellington. The Greek insurrection against Turkey found sympathy in all Christendom. When it had lasted into a seventh year, and had become a general nuisance by the piracy which rose out of anarchy, Mr. Canning brought about the Treaty of London (1827), which undertook to terminate it, not in in The four powers England, France, Austria, and Russia were called mediators, and professed no hostility to Turkey. Exactly at that moment the Sultan, chiefly by the energy of the Pasha of Egypt, had got together a powerful fleet, which apparently was competent to recover the dominion of Greece. But the allies (chiefly English) sailed into the Bay of Navarino, where the Egyptian fleet was lying. No one knows who fired the first shot-possibly the Turks, conceiving themselves to be assailed-and a general engagement followed, in which the Turkish fleet was destroyed. Russia was one of the mediators. The Emperor Nicolas had succeeded his brother Alexander in 1825; and no sooner had we destroyed the Egyptian fleet than he forthwith declared war upon the Sultan. The fighting on the Danube was very severe; Varna on the Black Sea was not taken without bribing the Pasha: yet, after two years of war, the Russians crossed the Balkan and forced the Sultan to sign the Peace of Adrianople. By this peace he counted that the Sultan was virtually his subject-ally, in the same sense that an Indian prince is subject to England as the paramount Power. Lord Aberdeen regarded the terms of peace as so destructive to Turkish independence that he made a most vehement protest, which remained secret until he himself published it during the Crimean war. In consequence of this humiliation to the Sultan (1829), his own Pashas despised him. The powerful and distant Pasha of Bagdad withheld his tribute, and in 1831 the Pasha of Aleppo was ordered to subdue him. A terrible plague in Bagdad and an inundation of the Tigris thoroughly disabled the revolting Pasha before his rival approached. But a far worse disaster followed in the insurrection of the Pasha of Egypt, who by his son Ismail at length invaded Syria, and after several years' warfare might have broken the empire in two. Nothing seemed more auspicious for the Russian game. With Christian subjects disaffected, and Turkish Pashas ambitious, the Sultan was sure to be submissive to the Czar, and likely indeed to need his aid, which would have been given as zealously, as afterwards to Austria against Hungary. It so happened that the French, who had devoured in imagination the whole north coast of Africa, ever since 1830, when they conquered Algiers were equally delighted at the successes of the Pasha of Egypt; apparently because they supposed that if he tried to stand up against the Sultan he would need French support. In fact the Egyptian victories reached the point at which the Porte absolutely needed aid from without. In such a condition of things Russia appeared to find her opportunity; but unless actually driven to despair, the Turkish Government would not accept so dangerous a protector, and preferred to ask aid of England. It was granted immediately, energetically, and successfully. Lord Palmerston, then Foreign Secretary, was regarded as the chief author of the policy; and its defence lay in the assertion that it was necessary to prevent Russia from becoming the Sultan's protector. The irritation in France was extreme, and all but involved us in war with her; yet Palmerston seemed to have succeeded in delaying the day at which the Turk should receive orders from St. Petersburg. Five years later the Emperor Nicolas paid a visit to England (1845) with the express object of sounding the new Cabinet; for Sir Robert Peel had displaced the Whigs since 1842. It is rumoured that on one occasion he startled Lord Aberdeen, then Foreign Se cretary, by the frank remark, ‘I can easily understand that you would like to have Egypt, and perhaps Cyprus or Crete, and to that I shall have no objection.' If it be uncertain whether we ought to believe such rumours, it is an unquestionable fact, which transpired in the opening of the Crimean war, that he left with the Ministry a secret document, embodying the results of their conferences as he interpreted them. Of course they found it expedient not to understand its meaning; but when it was published, no man of common sense doubted that it proposed our connivance in the dismemberment of Turkey. When in 1848 the revolution which ejected Louis-Philippe from Paris excited insurrection in Berlin and Vienna, even the distant Danubian Principalities were moved to entreat or demand of the Sultan various important reforms of a popular character. The Principalities are not Turkish possessions, nor are Turks admissible to their executive government; they are only under Turkish protection. The Sultan readily granted to Wallachia all that was asked, and probably would have done the same to Moldavia. But a Russian army presently invaded the latter province, and Fuad Pasha marched into Wallachia to save it from like invasion. Nevertheless, to avoid war with Russia, the Sultan consented to reverse his word and withdraw his reforms, and—a more galling humiliation still-to banish the patriotic men, the choice spirits of Wallachia, who had headed the movement for reform. Nor was this all. The Russian army of 20,000 men, roving freely through both the Principalities, threw itself into Transylvania to aid Austria, which had already entered into an unrighteous war with Hungary, begun by the foulest treachery. To the questions of Lord Palmerston the Russian Minister replied, that the army had entered Transylvania |