drunk as to forget the marks of obeisance due to the sacred image, whose presence he would not hesitate to pollute by any crime. When Nicholas raised the fiery cross of a holy war, he could count upon the fierce valour of an army of fanatics. Death for his religion and for the soil of Holy Russia opens to the Russian the gates of Paradise. If the religious fanaticism of the people and the ambition of the governing classes was great in Russia, here in England the political frenzy was no less violent. For reasons which they would probably have found it difficult to explain, the people took up the cause of the Turk with the wildest enthusiasm, and the shibboleth, “Balance of Power,” was continually in the mouths of men who were quite ignorant of its meaning. In France the desire for war was, as I have hinted, confined to the Emperor and his surroundings; but it was a sad disillusion for the Tsar when he saw the temper of England and of the Government of his friend Lord Aberdeen, a temper which that lover of peace was powerless to resist, the man whom, when he was at Windsor in 1844, he believed himself to have talked over to his views. Trusting to his conversations with the then Foreign Secretary, the Tsar was firmly convinced that England would not go to war, in spite of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, whom he hated more than ever for his defeat of Mentschikoff, in spite of Lord Clarendon, and in spite of the fact that at the Colonial Office there was a Minister called Palmerston, who, more than any other man, reflected the spirit of his countrymen, and who, by no great stretch of the imagination, might be supposed to have some little influence in foreign affairs. During his whole life the chief hobby of the Tsar had been his army. To increase its numbers, its smartness, and its imposing glitter was the object of his most watchful care. But his military aptitudes were confined to those of the drill-sergeant. Company drill, battalion drill, a grand review were his chief joy—a shabby uniform, a button awry, a mistake in some detail of kit were crimes to be suitably punished; no stricter martinet ever existed.[20] But of strategy, tactics and the science of war, he knew no more than the youngest drummer in one of his pet regiments. Whenever he interfered in any of the wars in which he engaged, he only hindered and hampered his generals.