“... Russia has a policy, as every great power has a policy, and she has as much right to have a policy as Germany or England. I believe the policy of Russia, taking a general view of it, to have been a legitimate policy, though it may have been inevitably a disturbing policy. When you have a great country in the centre of Europe, with an immense territory, with a numerous and yet, as compared with its colossal area, a sparse population, producing human food to any extent, in addition to certain most valuable raw materials, it is quite clear that a people so situated, practically without any seaboard, would never rest until it had found its way to the coast, and could have a mode of communicating easily with other nations, and exchanging its products with them. Well, for two hundred years Russia has pursued that policy; it has been _a legitimate though disturbing policy_. It has cost Sweden provinces, and it has cost Turkey provinces. But no wise statesman could help feeling that it was a legitimate policy--a policy which it was impossible to resist, and one which the general verdict of the world recognised--_that Russia should find her way to the sea-coast_. She has completely accomplished it. She has admirable seaports; she can communicate with every part of the world, and she has profited accordingly. “_But at the end of the last century she advanced a new view. It was not a national policy_; it was invented by the then ruler of Russia--a woman, a stranger, and an usurper--_and that policy was that she must have the capital of the Turkish Empire_. That was not a legitimate, that was a disturbing policy. _It was a policy like the French desire to have the Rhine--false in principle._ She had no moral claim to Constantinople; _she did not represent the races to which it once belonged_; she had no political necessity to go there, _because she already had two capitals_. Therefore it was not a legitimate but a disturbing policy. _As the illegitimate desire of France to have the Rhine has led to the prostration of France, so the illegitimate desire of Russia to have Constantinople led to the prostration of Russia...._”