Page:The invasion of the Crimea vol. 1.djvu/451

 APPENDIX. 409 sons for not adhering to it in a letter of the 20th of October : — ' Reasonable as it was, I have not thought it prudent to ' adhere to it. I found that Palnierston and Lord John ' and I had to consider how far I should be justified in ' creating a breach on such grounds ; for the practical ' question at issue would have been, whether we should ' impose on the Turks the necessity of making no altera- ' tion whatever in a ISTote which was to be signed by them ' and delivered in their name. To those Avho did not know ' all that had passed, such a condition would have appeared 1 harsh and unjust, and I felt that it could not properly be ' made the ground of an irreconcilable difference in the 1 Cabinet.' Thus the failure of the attempts to avoid a Avar between Great Britain and France on the one side, and Russia on the other, did not arise from any reluctance of Lord Aber- deen to insist on the signature of the Austrian Note by Turkey, but was owing to an irreconcilable difference be- tween Lord Palnierston and me on the one side, and Lord Aberdeen and various members of the Cabinet on the other. The Emperor of Russia was at this time in a state of frenzy, and would not have been content with anything less than the total destruction of the independence and dignity of the Sublime Porte. Some of the friends of Lord Aberdeen seem to have thought that a sentence in my book was intended to imply that Lord Aberdeen, once established in power, was reluc- tant to relinquish it and slow to carry out the wish he had expressed. Such was never my meaning or my opinion. I believed, as I believe now, and as I was taught by Sir James Graham to think, that Lord Aberdeen was unwilling to retain office as Prime Minister, but that ho was sur- rounded and beset by colleagues and adherents who could
 * were both determined to resist it to the utmost extremity,