In compensation, however, for the gradual parting of the ways of French and English diplomacy in the East, the Cabinet of Vienna seemed to have reverted frankly to what may be called the normal policy of Austria with reference to Turkey, and the policy of Metternich and Castlereagh was for a time steadily and consistently followed by Buol and Palmerston. This state of things continued until the double election of Prince Couza in the Danubian principalities caused a rift in the alliance. To Austria everything connected with the free navigation of the Danube and the political status of the provinces bordering on that great artery is, and must ever be, State interests of the first magnitude. To England, apart from their indirect bearing on the integrity and independence of Turkey, these questions were only matters of sentimental interest founded on academic sympathy with the general principle of nationalities. This sentiment, however, called into activity by the events unrolling themselves in Italy, was particularly strong in England at the time when the question of the principalities presented itself as a practical problem to the statesmen of Europe, and found in the Prime Minister of the day, Mr Gladstone, one of its keenest and most enthusiastic partisans. England completely severed her policy on this occasion from that of Austria. Whether such conduct, with reference to a branch of a much larger problem, was quite consistent with an Eastern policy considered as a whole, and whether such a deviation from the obligation of loyalty to an indispensable ally was or was not responsible for much of what subsequently occurred, is perhaps too delicate a question to be discussed here. Certain, however, is it that the desertion of Austria on this occasion by the ally she counted on in Eastern matters to maintain intact the provisions of the Treaty of Paris, and the instability of English foreign policy that it revealed, made a profound impression on the minds of the Austrian Emperor and his counsellors, and justified in their view the revolution that subsequently took place in the Eastern policy of Austria. Placed as the Middle Empire is—between jealous rivals and powerful neighbours, and with enormous and vital interests to safeguard—it is obliged to lean on one system of alliance or another, and what has been called “la politique du Cascole” is, as it were, a necessity of her position, and even a condition of her existence. When the events connected with the Herzegovinian insurrection come to be narrated in these pages, the part taken in them by Austria, and the _rôle_ played by her statesmen throughout the long negotiations preceding the Russo‐Turkish War and during its continuance, until the final act of the comedy enacted at Berlin, will have to be clearly set forth in detail, for it was Austria that played the chief part in all of them, and that finally secured the chief part in the spoil.