Christians of the Greek Church in Turkey, and therefore over a great
majority of the Sultan's European subjects. Such a construction of
the treaty in question, however, had always been refused by England
whenever Russia had stated it; and its assertion at this moment bore
an ominous aspect in conjunction with the views which the reigning
Czar Nicholas had made very plain to English statesmen, both when he
visited England in 1844 and subsequently to that visit. To use his
own well-known phrase, he regarded Turkey as "a sick man"--a
death-doomed man, indeed--and hoped to be the sick man's principal
heir. He had confidently reckoned on English co-operation when the
Turkish empire should at last be dismembered; he was now to find, not
only that co-operation would be withheld, but that strong opposition
would be offered to the execution of the plan, for which it had
seemed that a favourable moment was presenting itself. The delusion
under which he had acted was one that should have been dispelled by
plain English speech long before; but now that he found it to be a
delusion, he did not recede from his demands upon the Porte: he
rather multiplied them. The upshot of all this was war, in spite of
protracted diplomatic endeavours to the contrary; and into that war
French and English went side by side. Once before they had done so,
when Philip Augustus and Richard Coeur de Lion united their forces to
wrest the Holy Places from the Saracens; that enterprise had been
disgraced by particularly ugly scandals from which this was free; but
in respect to glory of generalship, or permanent results secured, the
Crimean campaign has little pre-eminence over the Fourth Crusade.

Recent disclosures, which have shown that Lord Aberdeen's Ministry
was not rightly reproached with "drifting" idly and recklessly into
this disastrous contest, have also helped to clear the English
commander's memory from the slur of inefficiency so liberally flung
on him at the time, while it has been shown that his action was
seriously hampered by the French generals with whom he had to
co-operate. From whatever cause, such glory as was gained in the
Crimea belongs more to the rank and file of the allied armies than to
those highest in command. The first success won on the heights of the
Alma was not followed up; the Charge of the Six Hundred, which has
made memorable for ever the Russian repulse at Balaklava, was a
splendid mistake, valuable chiefly for the spirit-stirring example it
has bequeathed to future generations of English soldiers, for its
illustration of death-defying, disciplined courage; the great fight
at Inkerman was only converted from a calamitous surprise into a
victory by sheer obstinate valour, not by able strategy; and the
operations that after Lord Raglan's death brought the unreasonably
protracted siege of Sebastopol to a close did but evince afresh how
grand were the soldierly qualities of both French and English, and
how indifferently they were generalled.

If the allies came out of the conflict with no great glory, they had
such satisfaction as could be derived from the severer losses and the
discomfiture at all points of the foe. The disasters of the war had
been fatal to the Czar Nicholas, who died on March 2nd, 1855, from
pulmonary apoplexy--an attack to which he had laid himself open, it
was said, in melancholy recklessness of his health. His was a
striking personality, which had much more impressed English
imaginations than that of Czar or Czarina since the time of Peter the
Great; and the Queen herself had regarded the autocrat, whose great
power made him so lonely, with an interest not untouched with
compassion at the remote period when he had visited her Court and had
talked with her statesmen about the imminent decay of Turkey. At that
time the austere majesty of his aspect, seen amid the finer and
softer lineaments of British courtiers, had been likened to the
half-savage grandeur of an emperor of old Rome who should have been
born a Thracian peasant. It proved that the contrast had gone much
deeper than outward appearance, and that his views and principles had
been as opposed to those of the English leaders, and as impossible of
participation by such men as though he had been an imperfectly
civilised contemporary of Constantine the Great. Since then he had
succeeded in making himself more heartily hated, by the bulk of the
English nation, than any sovereign since Napoleon I; for the war,
into which the Government had entered reluctantly, was regarded by
the people with great enthusiasm, and the foe was proportionately
detested.

Many anticipated that the death of the Czar would herald in a
triumphant peace; but in point of fact, peace was not signed until
the March of 1856. Its terms satisfied the diplomatists both of
France and England; they would probably have been less complacent
could they have foreseen the day when this hard-won treaty would be
torn up by the Power they seemed to be binding hand and foot with
sworn obligations of perdurable toughness; least of all would that
foresight have been agreeable to Lord Palmerston, Premier of England
when the peace was signed, and quite at one with the mass of the
people of England in their deep dislike and distrust of Russia and
its rulers.

The political advantages which can be clearly traced to this war are
not many. Privateers are no longer allowed to prey on the commerce of
belligerent nations, and neutral commerce in all articles not
contraband of war must be respected, while no blockade must be
regarded unless efficiently and thoroughly maintained. Such were the
principles with which the plenipotentiaries who signed the Treaty of
Paris in 1856 enriched the code of international law; and these
principles, which are in force still, alone remain of the advantages
supposed to have been secured by all the misery and all the
expenditure of the Crimean enterprise.

[Illustration: Florence Nightingale.]

But other benefits, not of a political nature, arose out of the
hideous mismanagement which had disgraced the earlier stages of the