But for the temptation held out by the accession of the Coalition Ministry to power in Great Britain, it is more than improbable that the Czar would have made any overtures of the kind. But at the head of that Ministry he saw Lord Aberdeen, “who knows me so well, who has full confidence in me as I have in him”—the extent of that confidence being marked by the statement, that he was convinced he could bring his lordship to an understanding in the course of ten minutes’ conversation. He had also remarked that at least two members of the Cabinet, in violation both of decency and of their duty as Ministers of the Crown, had been indulging in coarse and unmannerly invective against the Sovereign of France; and, as a matter of course, he arrived at the conclusion that they would be more ready to coalesce with him than to ally themselves cordially with a government which they had spoken of in public in such unexampled terms of contempt. In this calculation, however, he was deceived. Wrong-headed as Lord John Russell is, we do not believe that he would, for one moment, have allowed himself to become a consenting party to such a flagitious transaction as the partition of Turkey; and the same thing may be said of Lord Palmerston, whose exclusion, through short-sighted jealousy, from the Foreign Office at that particular time, we must regard as a national misfortune. But that matters not in the consideration of the point before us. Both circumstance and time concur to show that it was the accession of the Coalition Ministry to power, and the unwarrantable language used by some of its members towards the Emperor of France, that encouraged the Czar to bring forward, and to put into shape, the project which, no doubt, he had long entertained, but which could not be previously pursued for the want of a fitting opportunity. We regard, therefore, the formation of the Coalition Ministry in Britain as the event which directly led to the original overture—the hopes of the Czar being founded upon the political connections and understood tendencies of Lord Aberdeen, and also on the declared aversion of some of his colleagues to the head of the French Government. But for the formation of that Ministry the designs of Russia upon Turkey would have been postponed.