Page:The invasion of the Crimea vol. 1.djvu/49

BETWEEN THE CZAR AND THE SULTAN. 7 from a scheme of aggression is commonly so chap. obscure, so remote, and so uncertain, that when the ' world is in a state of equilibrium and repose, it is generally very hard to see how it can be really for the interest of any one State to go and do a wrong clearly tending to provoke a rupture. Here, then, there is something like a security for the main- taining of peace. But the security rests upon the supposition that a State will faithfully pursue its own welfare, and therefore it ceases to hold good in a country where the government happens to be in such bauds that the interests of the nation at large fail to coincide with the interests of its ruler. This history will not dissemble — it will broadly lay open — the truth that a people no less than a prince may be under the sway of a warlike passion, and may wring obedience to its fierce command from the gentlest ministers of state ; but upon the whole, the interests, the passions, and foibles which lead to war are more likely to be found in one man than in the band of public servants which is called a ministry. A ministry, indeed, will share in any sentiments of just national anger, and may even entertain a great scheme of state ambition, but it can scarcely lie under the sway of fanaticism, or vanity, or petulance, or bodily fear ; for though any one member of the Government may have some of these defects, the dangers they might well enough cause, if he alone were the ruler, are likely to be neutralised in council. Then, again, a man rightly called a minister of state is not a mere favourite of his sovereign, but the actual trans-