Page:Karl Marx - The Story of the Life of Lord Palmerston - ed. Eleanor Marx Aveling (1899).pdf/73

 Rh Vienna," while he lamented on July 13, 1840, that the occupation of Cracow being a violation of the Treaty of Vienna, "there were no means of enforcing the opinions of England, because Cracow was evidently a place where no English action could possibly take place"; two days later he concluded a Russian treaty, closing the Dardanelles to England "during times of peace with Turkey," and thus depriving England of the only means of "enforcing" the Treaty of Vienna, and transforming the Euxine into a place where no English action could possibly take place.

This point once obtained, he contrived to give a sham satisfaction to public opinion by firing off a whole battery of papers, reminding the "despotic Government, which measures right by power, and rules its conduct by expediency, and not by justice," in a sententious and sentimental manner, that "Russia, when she compelled Turkey to cede to her the outlet of a great European river, which forms the commercial highway for the mutual intercourse of many nations, undertook duties and responsibilities to other States which she should take a pride in making good." To this dwelling upon abstract principles, Count Nesselrode kept giving the inevitable answer that "the subject should be carefully examined," and expressing from time to time, "a feeling of soreness on the part of the Imperial Government at the mistrust manifested as to their intentions."

Thus, through the management of the noble lord, in 1853, things arrived at the point where the navigation of the Danube was declared impossible, and corn was rotting at the mouth of the Sulina, while famine threatened to invade England, France, and the south of Europe. Thus, Russia was not only adding, as The Times says, "to her other important possessions that of an iron gate between the Danube and the Euxine," she possessed herself of the key to the Danube, of a bread-screw which she can put on whenever the policy of Western Europe becomes obnoxious to punishment.