The task was indeed great, if not the greatest; but in London and on the fronts of war events combined to increase its difficulty. So far as the expedition was concerned, the collapse of the Russian armies under General von Hindenburg’s violent attacks in Courland, Poland, and Galicia was the event of most vital importance. In this month of May the enemy seized the port of Libau, approached Przemysl, threatened Warsaw, and drove the Russians back from the Carpathians into the basin of the Dniester. In consequence of these successive blows, it became certain that the Russian Army Corps of 43,000 men under General Istomine, which was to advance upon Constantinople from the eastern side as soon as our fleet and army dominated the Dardanelles, would be withdrawn, and the expectation of Russian assistance was abandoned. No longer threatened from the Black Sea, Turkey could now divert an equivalent force to the defence of the Peninsula, and did, in fact, divert four or five Divisions. What was worse, Ferdinand of Bulgaria, long hesitating on which side his interests lay, was encouraged by the Russian defeats to put his calculating trust upon the German alliance. Yet our diplomatists, apparently unpractised in deception and ingratitude, had fondly supposed that Bulgaria would never take arms against her Russian deliverer, and were even counting upon her co-operation in the Near East. In spite of such errors, it is currently believed that aristocratic diplomatists and Foreign Ministers are endowed with an ancestral instinct for diplomacy beyond the possible possession of people less nobly born, and for this reason, if for no other, we must indeed be thankful that our aristocracy has survived to protect us from blunders even more disastrous than their own.