Page:The invasion of the Crimea vol. 1.djvu/51

 BETWEEN THE CZAR AND THE SULTAN. 'J claimed by others will almost always be under the CHAP. pressure of motives very foreign to the real inter- ! ests of the State. He knows that by many he is regarded as a mere usurper, and that his home enemies are carefully seeking the moment when they may depose him, and throw him into prison, and ill-use him, and take his life. He commands great armies, and has a crowd of hired courtiers at his side ; but he knows that if his skill and his fortune should both chance to fail him in the same hour, he would become a prisoner or a corpse. He hears, from behind, the stealthy foot of the assassin; and before him he sees the dismal gates of a jail, and the slow, hateful forms of death by the hand of the law. Of course he must and he will use all the powers of the State as a defence against these dangers, and if it chance to seem likely — as in such circumstances it often does — that war may give him safety or respite, then to war he will surely go ; and although he knows that this rough expedient is one which must be hurtful to the State, he will hardly be kept back by such a thought, for, being, as it were, a drowning man who sees a plank within his reach, he is forced by the law of nature to clutch it ; and his country is then drawn into war, not because her interests require it, nor even because her interests are mis- taken by her ruler, but because she has suffered herself to fall into the hands of a prince whose road to welfare is distinct from her own.* agraph since the day when it was firat published in 1SG3.
 * No verbal or other change has been made in the above par-