frontier, we are to-day actually encouraging her to build a railway there? And that it is now another nation which stands as the natural barrier to Russian expansion to the West--Germany--whose power we are challenging, and that all tendencies point to our backing again the wrong horse, to our fighting _with_ the "semi-Asiatic barbarian" (as our fathers used to call him) against the nation which has close racial and cultural affinity to our own, just as half a century since the same fatal obsession about the "Balance of Power" led us to fight with the Mohammedan in order to bolster up for half a century his anti-Christian rule. The misreading of history in this matter is, unfortunately, not possible. The point upon which in the Crimean war the negotiations with Russia finally broke was the claim, based upon her reading of the Vienna note, to stand as religious protector of the Greek Christians in the Balkan peninsular. That was the pivot of the whole negotiations, and the war was the outcome of our support of the Turkish view--or, rather, our conduct of Turkish policy, for throughout the whole period England was conducting the Turkish negotiations; indeed, as Bright said at the time, she was carrying on the Turkish Government and ruling the Turkish Empire through her ministers in Constantinople. I will quote a speech of the period made in the House of Commons. It was as follows: Our opponents seem actuated by a frantic and bitter hostility to Russia, and, without considering the calamities in which they might involve this country, they have sought to urge it into a great war, as they imagined, on behalf of European freedom, and in order to cripple the resources of Russia....