Page:Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919).djvu/186

174 to the Nile Valley. When, therefore, Russian power in the Heartland increased, the eyes both of Britain and France were necessarily directed towards Suez, those of Britain for obvious practical reasons, and those of France partly for the sentimental reason of the great Napoleonic tradition, but also because the freedom of the Mediterranean was essential to her comfort in the Western Peninsula.

But Russian land-power did not reach, in the eyes of people of that time, as far as to threaten Arabia. The natural European exit from the Heartland was by the sea-way through the Straits of Constantinople. We have seen how Rome drew her frontier through the Black Sea, and made Constantinople a local base of her Mediterranean sea-power against the Scythians of the steppes. Russia, under Czar Nicholas, sought to invert this policy, and, by commanding the Black Sea and its southward exit, aimed at extending her land-power to the Dardanelles. The effect was inevitably to unite West Europe against her. So it happened that when Russian intrigue had involved Britain in the First Afghan War in 1839, Britain could not view with equanimity the encampment of a Russian Army on the Bosporus in order to defend the Sultan from the attack, through