A variety of facts related in the foregoing pages have, perhaps, sufficiently demonstrated the nullity of the independence still acknowledged by the Ottoman Court to the constitution of its transdanubean Principalities, and the little regard it bears to the common prosperity of their affairs. That those countries should resume independency, and maintain themselves in it by their own means alone, would, however, be as absurd, as it is impossible to expect. But that they should be rescued from the hands of those who act as their worst enemies, and placed under the special protection of some great Christian power, under whose influence they might be enabled to employ their resources to their own profit and to that of their neighbours, give to their trade all the extent it is capable of compassing,—under which, in short they might have the hope of soon placing themselves on a footing with the civilised world—formed an object which called forth the attention of Christian Europe, and which, in magnitude and importance, had at least equal claims to it as the question relating to the Ionian Islands, to which the Turks had no smaller pretensions, though neither more nor less valid. Conformity of religion, and the old standing connections between Russia and the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, point out that power as their natural protector; but, if the security of Europe forbids the recognition of further encroachments of the Russians on Turkey, though at the same time the political change in the principalities had been once regularly admitted, would not a partition made of them between Austria and Russia have been equally beneficial in its consequences, and at all events preferable in every respect to the _statu quo_? Indeed, upon the very principle of impeding the progress of Russia, the occupation of Wallachia by the Austrians was a measure of the first necessity, as sufficiently capable of forming an insurmountable barrier against the Russians. Without it, what obstacle will ever prevent these from extending the whole of their frontier on the side of European Turkey to the Danube? and once entirely masters of the borders of that river, the road to Constantinople is open to them, and the political existence of the Turkish empire is left to depend on the will and pleasure of the Russian emperor. Austria, as long as she is willing to maintain her present extent of power, would certainly feel herself far from secure at the approach of the Russians on so great a line of her eastern frontiers, and would not tacitly consent to be severed from Turkey in a manner so as to alter materially the course of her communications with that country, and almost to preclude the possibility of affording it future assistance; neither would the rest of Europe, interested in obstructing the further designs of aggrandisement of Russia, view such an event without alarming apprehensions.