The correspondence is now before the world, and the public must decide whether it is such as to justify Lord Aberdeen’s assertion, in reply to Lord Derby, “that if he thought it would be found to contain anything on which a charge could be founded against the Government, he would find himself egregiously mistaken.” Undoubtedly they are not chargeable with connivance—but they are chargeable with incapacity and misconduct so gross, that even connivance could not have produced effects more disastrous. If they did not play directly into the hands of the Czar, they failed to make him aware of the part which they were bound to take should he persist in his nefarious designs. They manifested no kind of honourable indignation at his offers; they received his cajolements with complacency, and paid him back with compliments and assurances not one whit more sincere than his own. If this really is the style in which our diplomatic intercourse is usually conducted, there is ample room for a reform. They cannot with justice assert that the Emperor was keeping them in the dark as to the nature of his own projects. He was, on the contrary, particularly frank. He insisted, over and over again, that Turkey was on the eve of dissolution; he even indicated that he might himself be the agent to force on that catastrophe—and yet Lord Aberdeen and his colleagues are now maintaining that he had deceived them! How, where, and when were they deceived? He showed them the victim, prophesied his immediate death, intimated that the fatal deathblow might be given by his hand, told them that he was in accord with Austria, invited them to declare their wishes as to the subsequent partition, and emphatically assured them that there was no time to be lost. Let us call things by their proper names. Stigmatise the conduct of the Czar, if you will, as ambitious, tyrannical, unprincipled, or nefarious—but do not accuse him of having concealed his purpose from the British Ministry. Were the Ministers then so blind that they failed to perceive his purpose? Of course they were not. The Cabinet which contained Lords Aberdeen and Palmerston, both of them experienced in foreign affairs, could be at no loss to divine his meaning, even if that had been more obscurely expressed; and consequently we must conclude that so early as March 1853 they were put thoroughly on their guard. They were aware that the Czar meditated the destruction of the Ottoman empire, and having that knowledge, every movement of his in the East, whether diplomatic or military, could only be regarded as progressive means towards the end proposed.