Page:The invasion of the Crimea vol. 2.djvu/15

PREFACE. IX for the Turks. Certainly, if any statesmen had ever engaged tlieir country in war to please the Turks, or were plotting to do so last autumn, it might have been well to denounce a policy so romantic, or rather grotesque ; but whoever may do me the lionour to read these pages, will see that our people were en- gaged in the war of 1854, by what— whether rightly or not — appeared to be the dictates of policy, rein- forced, it is true, by their own warlike ardour, and especially— as this volume shows — by their craving for an adventurous enterprise. Of course, when under those motives, our people had determined to fend off Kussia from lands in which the Sultan held dominion, they endeavoured to make the best of the mates with whom simple Geography told them they must needs be co-operating; but no one surely imagines that Lord Palmerston, or the statesmen of his day, ever dreamed of going to war for the sake of any Mah- mouds, or Osmans, or Mustaphas. That there were ways of maintaining the policy without resorting to arms, I labour to show, and succeed, as I think, in my effort ; but to decry the policy, because it in- volved alliance with the ill-governed, ill-governing Turks, is much like insisting that Wellington should have abandoned Hougoumont to Napoleon, because the owner of the farm was a Papist. Still it is vain to deny that, whether wisely or other- wise, a vast proportion of our citizens did in fact make a public vow against all idea of going to war for the sake of the Eastern Question ; and, since England can