So Lord Clarendon died loved and deeply regretted by all those whose good fortune had brought them into contact with him—held in honour by every sovereign and statesman in Europe. At the Foreign Office Lord Granville ruled in his place. No minister ever had to face greater difficulties. The Franco-German war at once ravelled all the threads of diplomacy into a tangle of which the intricate confusion was without a parallel, and the position became more and more complicated month by month. Prince Gortchakoff who, as I have shown in my account of what took place at St. Petersburg six years earlier, had made up his mind that he need no longer take the opposition of England into account, saw in the discomfiture of France his opportunity for flinging in our faces the Black Sea treaty, and, in defiance of all engagements, pushing forward into Central Asia, until Russia had advanced perilously near to our Indian frontier with only Afghanistan as a buffer state. Men have most unjustly blamed Lord Granville for this; but what could he do? To threaten when action is impossible is contemptible. England’s arm was not long enough to reach into Central Asia, and where could Russia be attacked by any puny force that England alone could at that time bring to bear upon her? Lord Russell had given England away in 1864. Lord Granville could now do no more than protest, and protest he did; but in diplomacy, as in other phases of life, hard words break no bones. Treaties are good until the strong man armed comes and tears them to tatters with his mailed fist. Prince Gortchakoff chuckled over the misfortunes of France, and felt more than ever convinced that England was a negligible quantity. When eight years later he went to the Congress of Berlin he had to sing another and a sadder tune. * * * * * One evening Lord Granville and I were dining together early at the Travellers’, as we sometimes did when he was in London alone for a night, in order to go to the French play; all of a sudden, in the middle of dinner, he turned round to me in a little abrupt way that was peculiarly his own and said, “Bertie, it must be a great bore for you to be a Conservative.” I laughed and asked why? “Well, because you always seem to me to live much more with all of us than with the members of your own party.”