Between the breaking up of the Conference and the breaking out of the war, the sequence of diplomatic action can be very briefly narrated. On the 19th January 1877 Prince Gortchakoff issued a Circular to the Powers, which can be summed up in the question, “What are you going to do about it?” One particular phrase, however, in this document must be noted. He says that the agreement in the Berlin Memorandum not being unanimous, and the crisis being aggravated, among other causes, by the revolution in Constantinople, the Cabinets recommenced negotiations, and, on the initiative of England, agreed upon a basis and guarantees to be discussed at a Conference at Constantinople. There is very little doubt that this revolution in Constantinople—which had the avowed object of checking absolutism and giving the Turkish people guarantees for good government—was in the eyes of Russia an aggravation of the crisis, and justified, and even necessitated, in her opinion, hostile action against Turkey. That Russia, who had undertaken the championship of liberty and progress among the inhabitants of a neighbouring empire, should be confronted by the establishment of institutions far more liberal and advanced than anything her own people were allowed to dream of; and that there should be sitting at Constantinople a Parliament, the very name of which was a terror and nightmare at St Petersburg, was without question an intolerable grievance. _À propos_ of this, the famous despatch of Count Pozzo di Borgo, of November 1828, to M. de Nesselrode, may be read with profit: “When the Imperial Cabinet examines the question as to whether the moment had arrived to take up arms against the Porte, some doubts as to the urgency of this measure might exist in the minds of those who had not sufficiently meditated on the effects of the sanguinary reforms that the Ottoman Chief had just executed with terrible energy. But now the experience that we have just had ought to unite everybody in favour of the line then adopted. The Emperor has put the Turkish system to the proof, and His Majesty has found in it a commencement of material and moral organisation which hitherto it has never possessed. If the Sultan has been enabled to oppose to us a more lively and sustained resistance whilst he had scarcely collected the elements of his new plans of reform and improvement, how much more formidable should we have found him if he had had time to give them more consistency and solidity?...”