dence, which Russia in several treaties with Turkey was pledged to respect. But those treaties had not been renewed by the peace of Belgrade, so that the Sultan's position was technically weak, and he would, on all grounds, have been finally disposed to accept Catherine's explanations of her policy, and her excuses for this untoward event, but for the intervention of M. de Vergennes, then Ambassador to the Porte, and afterwards French Minister of Foreign Affairs, who persuaded the Sultan to send a declaration of war to St. Petersburg.

Although Catherine's arrangements for solving the Turkish problem were not yet ripe, her armies were as successful as if she had chosen her own time, thanks, in part, to certain precautions which she had previously taken in view of the eventual struggle. A faint prelude to the Russian nineteenth-century way of dealing with Turkey had already been heard in the reign of Peter, who made some abortive attempts to rouse the Greeks and Albanians to arms, addressing the Greeks in particular in a proclamation calculated by its dialect and syntax to make Plato or Xenophon turn in their graves with rage. Catherine was the first to discover and apply the complete modern method. Long before peace was disturbed, she engaged the services of a Macedonian Hellene, one Papazolis, who sowed the seeds of insurrection in the Porte's Christian provinces, especially in the Peloponnesus, where he arranged a revolt calculated to raise up 100,000 combatants, of whom the Mainots were to form the nucleus. Moldavia, Wallachia, Servia, and Montenegro, were overrun by other Russian emissaries. The mise en scène of the war included a detail which usefully illustrates the present anxiety of Russia to provide Montenegro with the outlets on the Adriatic so notoriously required for the very large commercial movements of that country. Guns and powder were landed on the coast by Prince Dolgorouky for the use of the Montenegrins, who, as soon as hostilities commenced, broke into Albania, Bosnia, and Herzegovina.

After some preliminary bungling before Choczim, not very dissimilar to the impotent experiments in strategy witnessed last year before Plevna and on the Lom, which caused the great Frederick to describe the war as the contest of the one-eyed and the blind, the Russians fought their way into Moldavia and Wallachia, and, after five campaigns, imposed on the Turks the peace of Kainardji, signed by the Grand Vizier to save his army from capitulation, after he had been blockaded in the lines of Shumla. The second year of the war included the naval victory of Tchesme, won by a Russian fleet from the Baltic, whose unexpected attempt to revive, by another road, the mari

time enterprises of the ancient principality of Kiev against Byzantium caused a profound impression throughout Europe, and was immortalized by Gibbon in a special paragraph of the 'Decline and Fall.' This grand operation was foreign, both in conception and execution. The despatch of the fleet from Cronstadt to the Mediterranean was suggested by a Venetian nobleman; and the Russian Lepanto was won chiefly by three Englishmen-Elphinstone, Greig, and Dugdale.

If cosmopolitan influences were so largely present in the outburst and conduct of the war, they were equally perceptible in the conclusion of the peace. That Catherine refrained from exacting from Turkey at Kainardji the territorial concessions commensurate with the military situation at the close of her fifth campaign, was the consequence of a collision between two principles, which a Muscovite publicist has recently called by the peculiarly appropriate names of Russia's 'idealism' and 'loyalty to duty' and the naked materialism of European society. After the Seven Years' War, Russia's old alliance with Austria, the fruit of the friendship of Elizabeth and Maria Theresa, was superseded by an intimate connection between St. Petersburg and Berlin, the result of the personal necessities of Frederick, whose alarm for the consequences of a resumption of hostilities by Austria had induced him, in violation of his natural sympathies for France, to purchase Russian goodwill by the signature of a treaty for reciprocal offence and defence. This connection it was the object of the Court of Vienna to control, and, if possible, to break up. Austria's anxieties on that side were aggravated by the development of the Russian intervention in Poland, itself the precursor of still graver alarms of a nature not previously felt in Vienna. Maria Theresa's son and co-regent, Joseph, and her acute minister, Kaunitz, had discovered that it was time for Austria, abandoning a policy founded on the dangers and terrors of a former day, to consider whether clouds from a new quarter were not gathering on her frontier, and whether in her hereditary enemy, the Sultan, she would not now find her natural ally. As the Turkish war proceeded, and Catherine's larger aims were developed, the King of the Romans and the Minister recognised the necessity of an immediate Austrian change of front.

Joseph's ideas are best presented in his own words :

'If the Russians force the Danube, the time will have arrived for us to occupy that river with a body of troops, so as to cut off the Russian line of communication and force them to a rapid retreat, in which their army may be destroyed. . . . If the Russians threaten and take Constantinople by sea, and so menace the whole Turkish Empire, Vol. 146.-No. 291.

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then it will be better for us to occupy those provinces of Turkey which have a value for Austria, than to let them fall into the hands of Russia.'

The doubts, which may have hampered Imperialist policy of late, arose in double force in presence of the complications of 1770. The ideas of Joseph and Kaunitz could hardly emerge from the condition of pia desideria, so long as there was an uncertainty as to the course which Prussia might probably pursue. Joseph undertook the work, too delicate to be effected by ordinary diplomatic manipulation, of sounding 'the ogre of Potsdam; and with that view he contrived to bring about, though not without some difficulty, a meeting between himself and Frederick at Neisse, in Silesia, which was followed by a return visit by that monarch to the King of the Romans at Neustadt, in Bohemia. These famous interviews excited at the time almost more anxiety, and led to the dissemination of more numerous fables, than the meetings of the late Emperor Napoleon with the various European potentates. At Neisse the august personages chiefly beat about the bush, discussing the battle of Bethhoron, the phalanx of Epaminondas, and the fugues of Bach, vaguely asserting general propositions about the state of Poland, and trying to fathom each other's secret wishes and designs. At Neustadt the King of the Romans spoke out more plainly, and told Frederick that Austrian forbearance in respect to Russia's proceedings on the Danube had its limits, and that the EmpressQueen would not suffer the destruction of Turkey, or even permit Catherine to make any important territorial changes. Frederick's language indicated his recognition of the altered conditions of the Turkish problem, and his dislike of the situation to which his engagements to Catherine tied him. He said to Kaunitz: 'This infernal Turkish war alarms and disturbs me. I should be in despair to be involved in a new conflict with you, and I feel that if the Russians cross the Danube, you could scarcely remain quiet spectators of the incident and of further eventualities.'

To Joseph's hints that Prussia should adopt a vigorous policy Frederick was deaf; but he agreed to sound Catherine on her willingness to accept his mediation and that of Austria in her Turkish war. Catherine would give no positive reply, but said that she had ordered Romanzov to treat directly with the Turks, and she went on fencing meanwhile with Frederick's brother, Prince Henry, then on a mission to St. Petersburg, asking him on one occasion if he advised her to pass the Rubicon." At length the Czarina affected to be ready for mediation. Her terms were-Azov, the independence of the Crimea, the independence of Moldavia and Wallachia, or their sequestration

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for twenty-five years, with an island in the Archipelago, and other minor advantages. Frederick's reply was, that such propositions were monstrous, and that they must have been made in order to bring on a war with Austria; on reading them, he observed, he felt as if horns were growing out of his head. And, wrote the King to his brother, if they were not essentially modified, he should throw the whole business up and leave these gentry to their fate. He would suggest, as the extreme of concession to be obtained from the Turks, that Catherine might keep Azov. It was preposterous to suppose that Austria and the Italians would stand an island in the Archipelago being converted into Russian soil.

Catherine now affected to tone down her pretensions. Her assumed moderation did not satisfy Kaunitz, who argued that the Czarina's mind was irrevocably set on the retention of Azov, Oczakov, and certain districts on the shore of the Black Sea, and on the establishment of the independence of the Crimea. If her schemes were not opposed, observed the Austrian Minister, she would utterly imperil not only Constantinople, but the very existence of the Turkish Empire, and lay the foundations of such overwhelming Russian power by sea and land, that nothing would be able to resist her.' Curious as the fact may sound in 1878, the fears of Kaunitz were aggravated by the growing intimacy of the Cabinets of St. Petersburg and London. The Continent, he thought, was menaced by a new and dangerous maritime confederacy, whose united fleets would sweep in triumph from the Dardanelles to the Sound.

Those who are initiated into the present conditions of European diplomacy may suspect irony in the statement, but it is a fact that European ambassadors a hundred years ago were constantly acquainted, not only with the niceties of cookery, court gossip, and ombre, but also with the politics, history, and languages of the countries where they were appointed to reside. A brilliant example of this class was Thugut, the Imperial representative in Turkey, thanks to whose contrivance and tact the Porte undertook to pay a large subsidy in ready cash, and to allow a rectification of the Imperial territory in Wallachia, in exchange for the promise of an eventual Austrian interference against Russia, as a first step towards which a mobilisation of Austrian troops would shortly be put in hand. While the Cabinet of Vienna was preparing to carry out this scheme, Frederick was pushing on a negociation of another sort. As the destruction of Turkey was to Alberoni (or the writer who assumed his name), so was the partition of Poland to Frederick-the salve wherewith to heal Europe's bleeding wounds. The priority of infamy in that nefarious

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nefarious transaction may be assigned to various individuals, according as we fix our attention on the suggestors or the actual executants of the finis Poloniæ. The general list of the perpetrators, direct and indirect, of that execrable crime, includes the names of Charles Gustavus X. of Sweden, Peter the Great, Patkul, Augustus the Strong of Saxony and Poland, Choiseul, Frederick, and Catherine. The subject has not yet been discussed with the ability, or even with the industry, which it ought to attract. Our own provisional verdict would be, that in the last stage of the affair Frederick was the most active and most responsible of the royal culprits. However this may have been, it is certain that the partition was negociated between Catherine and Henry ; that Maria Theresa acceded with a reluctance very imperfectly expressed in her protest as current in the ordinary books; and that Frederick, though glad to have realized, in the annexation of West-Preussen, his dream of recovering the long-lost territory of the Teutonic order, was yet largely influenced by his desire to create a diversion which should prevent the collision of the Imperial Courts. His system succeeded. The threats of Austrian intervention would hardly have deterred Catherine from taking her full pound of flesh; but the bait of Poland, proffered to compensate her disappointment in Moldavia and Wallachia, caused her to moderate, or at any rate to postpone, her designs. Like Atalanta in the race, she stooped to gather the golden spoil, and thus was diverted from her immediate aim.

Austria, meanwhile, had suddenly turned her back upon herself' by tearing up Thugut's treaty, and sending the troops, which were to have protected the Sultan against Russia, to seize the Turkish district of the Bukowina, on the plea of its ancient dependence on Transylvania. This extraordinary operation, though amicably admitted by the Porte, marked the approach of a fresh revolution in the ideas of the Cabinet of Vienna. Joseph and Kaunitz were now returning to the view of Eugene, who had recommended the seizure of Moldavia and Wallachia, and other Turkish territory on the right bank of the Save and Danube. But this was a collateral object of Hapsburg policy, not the main design, which was revealed when, three years after these events, the Bavarian family line became extinct, and the Kaiser proceeded to annex Lower Bavaria and parts of the Upper Palatinate. The so-called 'Potato War' between Prussia and Austria ensued, a somewhat Platonic conflict, terminated in 1779 by the peace of Teschen, in which Joseph abandoned great part of his pretensions; a result due in no small degree to Catherine's energetic declarations on Frederick's side. The situation left after this peace imposed on Joseph the necessity of paying

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