Russia was to take Bessarabia, and Turkey to cede Kolour to Persia--obviously to earn Persian gratitude for Russia. Subject to this compromise Lord Beaconsfield agreed not to make a _casus belli_ of any Article in the Treaty of San Stefano, each one of which had been so fiercely condemned by Lord Salisbury’s Circular of the 1st of April. The intention of the Government was to keep the Salisbury-Schouvaloff compromise secret. The people were to be left to imagine that Ministers had won a diplomatic victory by forcing Russia into the Congress fettered, whilst England entered it free. All the points agreed on privately were to be fought over publicly by the representatives of England in the Congress as if no such agreement were in existence, and Englishmen were to be deluded into the idea that their diplomatic agents had, by superhuman efforts at Berlin, not by private huckstering in London, obtained enormous concessions from Russia. But when the _Globe_ newspaper astonished the world by divulging the secret agreement, the people--more especially the enthusiastic Tories--refused to be [Illustration: PRINCE BISMARCK. (_From the Photograph by Loescher and Petsch, Berlin._)] deluded. What, they asked, had Ministers made such a fuss about? Why had they passed war votes, brought Indian troops to Malta at the risk of violating the Constitution, and kept Europe in a fever of unrest, if they were prepared to accept a compromise with Russia, so fatal to the Turk as this? In fact, public opinion was so much excited that Lord Salisbury, on the 3rd of June, had the courage to deny that the secret compromise published by the _Globe_ on the 31st of May was “authentic.” Ministerial organs, also tried to convince the world that it was a forgery which had been treacherously uttered from the Russian. Embassy.[131] For a time this denial lulled all popular suspicions. By way of enforcing it Sir Stafford Northcote, when pressed, on the 6th of June, as to what policy Ministers would pursue in Congress, referred the House of Commons to the drastic Circular of the 1st of April, which tore every Article in the Treaty of San Stefano to pieces. As a matter of fact that Circular became a bit of waste-paper when Lord Salisbury signed his secret agreement with Russia, the existence of which the Government were now denying.