similar liberation. The fairest portion of Europe would have been restored to the rule of religion, liberty, and civilisation, and a barrier erected by European freedom against Asiatic despotism in the regions where it was first successfully combated. “What is the grand difficulty that now surrounds the Eastern question, which has rendered it all but insoluble even to the most far-seeing statesman, and has compelled the Western Powers, for their own sake, to ally themselves with a state which they would all gladly, were it practicable without general danger, see expelled from Europe? Is it not that the Ottoman empire is the only barrier which exists against the encroachments of Russia, and that if it is destroyed the independence of every European state is endangered by the extension of the Muscovite power from the Baltic to the Mediterranean? All see the necessity of this barrier, yet all are sensible of its weakness, and feel that it is one which is daily becoming more feeble, and must in the progress of time be swept away. This difficulty is entirely of our own creation; it might have been obviated, and a firm bulwark erected in the East, against which all the surges of Muscovite ambition would have beat in vain. Had the dictates of humanity, justice, and policy been listened to in 1822, and a _Christian_ monarchy been erected in European Turkey, under the guarantee of Austria, France, and England, the whole difficulties of the Eastern Question would have been obviated, and European independence would have found an additional security in the very quarter where it is now most seriously menaced. Instead of the living being allied to the dead, they would have been linked to the living; and a barrier against Eastern conquest erected on the shores of the Hellespont, not with the worn-out materials of Mahommedan despotism, but with the rising energy of Christian civilisation.