The enforcement of this view might involve its support by force of arms, and he worked all his life for our military preparedness, holding that it was the best guarantee that armed intervention would be unnecessary, as it was also the best guarantee of our own immunity from attack. At this moment "foreign affairs" meant the Eastern Question, in regard to which the future of two nations, Russia and Greece, specially interested him. He was notably a Phil-Hellene, who "dreamed of a new Greece"--a "force of the future instead of a force of the past; a force of trade instead of a force of war; European instead of Asiatic; intensely independent, democratic, maritime." Here, and not in any Slavonic State, did he see the rightful successors to the Ottoman dominion. Towards Russia his feelings were complex: admiration for the people accompanied detestation of the Government, and the unscrupulous power commanding the services of so vast and virile a people always appeared in his eyes as a menace to civilization. Yet in the future of Russia he "firmly believed," and he repeats in speech after speech this creed: "Behind it are ranged the forces of the future." "To compare the Russia of to-day to the Russia that is to come is to compare chaos to the universe." "If by Russia we mean the leading Slavonic power, whether a Russia one and indivisible, or a Slavonian confederation, we mean one of the greatest forces of the future." [Footnote: Speech at Notting Hill, August, 1876.] Sir Charles's speeches, taken in conjunction with the diary, give the story of these Eastern troubles from the outside as well as from the inside. His constituents had little excuse for being carried away by popular cries. In his speech on the last day of the session he advocated the sending of a "strong and efficient man to Constantinople in the name of the Western Powers to carry out that policy of protection of Christian subjects of Turkey which England had intended after the Crimea," [Footnote: _Ibid._] But while condemning with the greatest energy the Turkish barbarities in Bulgaria, he warned his constituents against overlooking atrocities committed elsewhere, "for there was not one pin to choose between Circassian ruffians on the one side and Montenegrin ruffians on the other." To those who "were carried away by their belief that the conflict was one between the present and the past, and between Christianity and Islamism, and declared that the Turks must be driven out of Europe," he pointed out the larger questions at stake.