Page:The invasion of the Crimea vol. 2.djvu/421

 APPENDIX. 391 Court of Austria being requested by the Cabinet of St Petersburg to apply for the support of the two Maritime Powers, in order to obtain the acceptance of these prelimi- naries by the Sublime Porte. After mature deliberation, the Plenipotentiaries of France and Great Britain, taking as the basis of their examination the previous documents which had received the sanction of the four Powers, established the existence of radical differences between those documents and the proposed preliminaries. 1. Inasmuch as the evacuation of the Danubian Princi- palities, which is fixed to take place after the signature of the preliminaries, is made to depend on the departure of the combined fleets, not only from the Llack Sea but from the Straits of the Bosphorus and of the Dardanelles — a condition which could only be admitted by the Maritime Powers after the conclusion of the definitive Treaty. 2. Inasmuch as the document now under consideration tends to invest with a form strictly conventional, bilateral, and exclusively applicable to the relations of the Porte with Eussia, the assurances relative to the religious privi- leges of the Greeks — assurances which the Porte has only ofi'ered to give to the five Powers at the same time and in the form of a simple identic declaration. The assurances, in fact, once inserted in the preliminary Treaty, must then needs be reproduced in the definitive Treaty, and would be accompanied, moreover, by an official note confirmatory of the said privileges exclusively addressed to the Court of Russia, a note which, in its turn, Avould be considered as annexed to the Treaties ; that is to say, as having the same force and the same effect. 3. Inasmuch as the preliminaries communicated to Vienna are, by implication, withheld from any discussion in Conference upon the modifications considered necessary to make them correspond with the original text of the