Page:Wallachia and Moldavia - Correspondence of D. Bratiano whit Lord Dudley C. Stuart, M.P. on the Danubian Principalities.djvu/11

 lost the habit of resisting. In fact, on this question we have seen the Czar arguing for and against according to his good pleasure, yet being always in the right. When it is his interest to prevent Turkey exercising some right which she pretends to have on Moldavia and Wallachia, treaties in hand he opposes her with sovereignty and stops her short. When on the contrary he wishes to obtain some concession in the Principalities, he proclaims Turkey their sovereign and absolute mistress, who may dispose of them as she pleases; and Turkey, partly from vanity, but more from lack of faith in her own strength, easily lets herself be persuaded that she really is not only their suzeraine, but their veritable sovereign, and seems not to perceive that the sovereignty with which the Czar invests her tends only to her own destruction.

As to the part played by the young Austrian Emperor in the train of the Czar, it would be simply ridiculous, if it were not fatal to him and to his empire. Austria will pay dear for having wrapped herself in the mantle of Russia, in order to have the pleasure of shewing her teeth at Turkey. She will never more come out of that mantle—it will be her winding-sheet. The Sclavonian peoples, who. alone amongst her subjects have hitherto remained faithful to her, will daily become more persuaded that at Vienna there is but a little emperor, a viceemperor, and the great, the true emperor is at Saint Petersburg; and hence, if the Czar so orders, they will march on Vienna as readily as on Constantinople.

My letter, my lord, has become so lengthy that I must ask your attention anew to the two subjects on which I have taken the liberty to address you : The forty-two millions of Roumanian piastres demanded by Russia from the Principalities, and the threats of a new Russian invasion. The better to show the injustice of Russia’s demand for an indemnity, I will remark, 1st, That her troops entered the Principalities to establish what is termed order, not even to guarantee her own territories against the dangers of a revolutionary contagion, but merely to occupy a stratagetic position, to which, with great reason, the