It would be difficult to carry intentional bad faith further. All this time, notes and memorandums were flying about the Chancelleries of Europe to force the Porte to give guarantees for suppressing an insurrection which was being organised and fed by bands “all well‐armed” across a friendly frontier, its suppression being thus rendered materially impossible. As well might one try to extinguish a conflagration, over an unlimited area, that was being continually fed by petroleum springs, the sources of which could not be got at. Nor let it be supposed that to guard such a line of frontier was impossible. The rebels had it all their own way. And so had the Diplomatists of the “Allied Courts of Berlin, Vienna, and St Petersburg.” Russian Committees were joining their efforts to Austrian. On the 14th February 1876, Sir H. Elliot writes to Lord Derby: “The accounts of the encouragement given to the insurgents at Ragusa greatly exceeds all that I was prepared for. The Russian Consulate is the open resort of the insurgent chiefs; their correspondence is sent to the Consul, who is a party to all their projects, and associates himself intimately with them. He does not appear to make any attempt to conceal the part he is playing, for on the occasion of the death of the chief Maxima, in one of the late encounters, the Russian flag at the Consulate was hoisted at half‐mast, and M. Jomini himself joined the funeral procession. “Some of the wounded when asked why they continue the struggle when the Porte is ready to grant all their demands, have answered plainly that they are bound to go on as long as they are told by Russia to do so. The assurances given at St Petersburg of the wish of the Imperial Government that the insurgents would lay down their arms, must naturally go for nothing as long as its official Representative, with whom they are in communication, encourages them to go on.”[72] Pretty plain speaking this! and Austria that continued the “exequatur” to a foreign Consul, acting thus on its territory towards a friendly Power. So gross and palpable was this assistance given by Austria to the insurgents, whilst pretending all the time to be so keenly anxious for its suppression, that Lord Derby thought it necessary on the 10th March 1876, to give the following instructions to Sir A. Buchanan, the English Ambassador at Vienna: “I have to inform Your Excellency that it has come to the knowledge of Her Majesty’s Government, through Her Majesty’s Ambassador at Constantinople, that the Porte had received information that a severe fight took place on the Dalmatian frontier on the 4th inst., and that on the following day, the combat was renewed by a force said to be _700 strong, who came from Austrian territory with large supplies of ammunition, and that this having occurred so immediately after the assurances of the Austro‐Hungarian Government that their frontier