Page:Wallachia and Moldavia - Correspondence of D. Bratiano whit Lord Dudley C. Stuart, M.P. on the Danubian Principalities.djvu/3

 strength, as well as the ascendancy of her diplomacy, which no rival now seeks to dispute, are great enough to allow her to speak boldly to the monarchs, and to make her voice everywhere respected.

In this state of things, if I prefer addressing myself to you, my lord, and if I believe that I fulfil my duty in writing to you these lines, it is because your courageous and incessant efforts on behalf of Poland, Italy, Roumania, and Hungary—in favor of all the oppressed peoples—have made you, so to speak, the official intermediary*between free England, and the peoples who aspire to become like her. Henceforth it is a right acquired for the peoples, when they desire to plead their cause before the tribunal of the public opinion of Great Britain, to come straight to you, and for you to receive their complaints in the name of your powerful country.

Permit me, my lord, in a few words, to recall to your memory the events which have taken place in the Principalities, during the last few years. The justice and moderation of the Roumanian Revolution of 1848, was such, that, Russia excepted, all the great powers, and Turkey first of all, officially recognised the new order of things. Some time after, Turkey, yielding to the threats and suggestions of Russia, seized by surprise the town of Bucharest, destroyed the work of the revolution, and put in force the old regime, in all its rigour. Notwithstanding, or rather justifying themselves by the presence of the Turks at Bucharest, the Russians, in their turn, invaded the Principalities.

Turks and Russians in their proclamations protested the excellence of their motives, declared that they religiously respected the institutions of the country, and that they had only come to do justice to the complaints which the Roumanians had more than once made to the Porte before their revolution. And then Russia forced from the Porte the convention of Balta Liman, in virtue of which, in contempt of the treaties between the Roumanians and the Turks, in contempt of those previously concluded between Turkey and Russia, the Principalities were deprived of all their constitutional guarantees—the liberty of the