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 demeanour was generally conciliatory and conducive to a mutual understanding. Impressment and the West Indian trade were the chief points under discussion; but minor matters of boundary, fisheries, river navigation, and above all the still pending question of the slave trade, occupied the plenipotentiaries. A compromise was at length arrived at by the conference, but the convention, signed 13 March 1824, which elicited George Canning's hearty admiration, was rejected by the American Senate, and all that had been achieved was a general rapprochement between the two governments, which in later years led to a settlement of the matters under discussion.

In 1824 it was decided that Canning was again to be sent to Turkey. He heard the news with dismay, for his former memories were not agreeable, and he had a very lively repugnance to again encountering the weary prolixities of Turkish diplomacy. Where duty summoned him, however, there would he go at any personal sacrifice. Meanwhile he had a brief reprieve in a preliminary mission in November to St. Petersburg. The business which drew him there was of the utmost importance. Russia was believed to favour the cause of the Greeks in the war of independence, and to be disposed to join in a scheme of mediation with England and France. England, while anxious not to let Russia move alone in the matter, and after entering into negotiations for such mediation, became suddenly convinced that the time was not ripe for interference, and absolutely refused to join in any acts of coercion. George Canning had set his heart on the liberation of Greece without the use of force, and his cousin was therefore sent to St. Petersburg to confer on the Greek question and smooth away the ill-feeling which George Canning's policy of no coercion and his abrupt withdrawal from the negotiations had aroused in the minds of the czar and his ministers, and also to compose a boundary dispute between England and Russia in north-west America. The last he duly accomplished, and his judicious mode of dealing with the sore subject of Greece in conversations with Count Nesselrode (March 1825) prepared the way for the protocol which the Duke of Wellington and Count Nesselrode signed (4 April 1826) on the occasion of the former's complimentary visit to the new Emperor Nicholas on his accession a year later. Canning left the Russian ministers in a more tranquil frame of mind, and also took the opportunity, in passing through Vienna, to deliver a royal letter to the Emperor of Austria, and to confer with Metternich on the views of the British government towards the liberal movements then springing up in Europe.

In October 1825 Canning started on his second mission to Constantinople. In the summer he had married a second time. His young wife was a daughter of James Alexander, M.P., of Somerhill, near Tonbridge. In taking her with him he was under the impression that his absence abroad would not be of long duration; for in an interview with his cousin George, the latter informed him that Lord Liverpool had consented to his proximate appointment as vice-president of the board of control—a promise which George Canning's death, in 1827, made of no effect. His objects at Constantinople were chiefly the pacification of Greece and the reconciliation of Turkey and Russia. In the first matter he had to carry out his cousin's instructions, which were dictated by enthusiastic sympathy for the Greeks, and included virtually the separation of Greece from the Ottoman empire. The time was ill chosen for such mediation, and it may be doubted whether the ambassador, with all his pity for the Greeks, would have himself selected this moment for intervention. When the insurrection was in its first strength, it might have been less difficult to induce the Porte to accord favourable terms to the Greeks. But the arms of Turkey were now triumphant, and the Greeks desperate. Canning had an interview with Mavrocordato at Hydra on his way to Constantinople, and thoroughly gauged the deplorable straits to which the Greeks were reduced. Landing at Ipsera he had found the town an empty shell, without an inhabitant; while the bones of mothers self-destroyed, with their dead children beside them, bore witness to the cruelties of the Turks and the heroism that inspired such desperate deeds to escape them. Two survivors, worn to skeletons, testified more eloquently than words to the terrible pass in which the Greeks now found themselves, and the ambassador exclaimed: ‘How I longed to be the instrument of repairing such calamities by carrying my mission of peace and deliverance to a successful issue!’ The circumstances which moved the mediator to pity only nerved the Porte to more strenuous resistance. Sultan Mahmud had been laboriously building up the Turkish empire; he had suppressed Aly Bey and the great feudal landowners, and soon after Canning's arrival accomplished the final overthrow of the most menacing element in the state by the massacre of the Janissaries. He was organising a new army, and it was not to be expected that a sultan in the midst of a military revival would consent to any dismem-