It is impossible not to feel that Russia is about to occupy a new
position in Europe, which, if no event occurs to obstruct her in
her course, must greatly increase her influence and her power for
good or for evil. She is to be the protector of Austria, not against
foreign enemies, but against one of the nations of which that empire
is composed. She is to re-establish and maintain, by military force,
a government which has been unable to maintain itself against its
internal enemies--a government which a nation of fourteen millions of
people has rejected, fought, and beaten. A great power cannot interfere
in the internal affairs of another state, to the extent of maintaining
there by force of arms a government incapable of maintaining itself
against the nation, without getting involved in the relations of the
government it upholds, to an amount of which it is impossible to fix
or to predict the limits, but of which the tendency has ever been, and
must ever be, progressively to increase the power of the protecting
over the protected government; and the single fact that the interests
of Austria were in this manner inseparably bound up, for a time of
indefinite duration, with those of Russia, would give to the great
northern power a preponderance, both in Europe and in Asia, such as no
hereditary monarchy has possessed in modern times.
With 150,000 or 180,000 men in Hungary, Wallachia, and Moldavia,
the Russian armies would encircle the frontiers of Turkey, from the
shores of the Adriatic to the frontiers of Persia. With a government
in Austria dependent upon the support of those armies, the power that
has hitherto been the chief security of Turkey against the military
superiority of Russia, would be at the command of the court of St
Petersburg. The Sclavonic tribes, which form the chief part of the
Turkish population in Europe, seeing themselves enveloped by the armies
of Russia, guiding and controlling the power of Austria, in addition to
her own, must be thoroughly demoralised, even if Russia should abstain
from all attempts to debauch them. They will feel that they have no
course left but to court her, to look to her whose force is visibly
developed before them, is in contact with them, surrounds them, and
appears to be irresistible everywhere. They will find in the unity
of race an inducement to adhere to the rising destinies of the great
Sclavonic empire--their instincts will teach them to abandon, in time,
the fabric that is about to fall.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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