Lord Clarendon, in a letter to the ambassador, thus described his own views of the treaty:— I think as you do about the terms of peace, but I am not the least sorry that peace is made, because, notwithstanding our means of carrying on the war, I believe we should have run risks by so doing for which no possible success would have compensated. We should have been alone.... If you could have seen all that was passing when I got to Paris—the bitterness of feeling against us, the kindly (I might almost say the enthusiastic) feeling towards Russia, and the determination, if necessary, to throw over the Vienna conditions in order to prevent the resumption of hostilities (money matters and Bourse speculations being the main cause), you would have felt as I did, that our position was not agreeable, and that Brunnow was justified in saying that they did not come to make or negotiate peace, but to accept the peace which was to be crammed down their throats.... Unluckily, too, just as negotiations began the French army fell ill, and the Emperor himself admitted to me that, with twenty-two thousand men in hospital and likely to be more, peace had almost become a military as well as a financial and political necessity for him.[37] Lord Stratford’s words on hearing that the treaty was signed were, “I would rather have cut off my right hand than have signed that treaty.” The writer paid a second visit to Constantinople in 1857. He rode there from Belgrade, passing through Bulgaria on the way, and was witness of the miserable condition to which this province had been reduced by Ottoman rule. He spent a few weeks at Therapia, where the Ambassador was residing, and was favoured by many conversations with him. Lord Stratford was always most kind and communicative to young men. He made no secret of his bitter disappointment. The treaty of Paris, he alleged, was a death-blow to the cause of reform in Turkey. If the Christian population were not protected from misgovernment, the Empire was doomed. He was under no illusion as to the misgovernment of the country. He knew that if left to themselves the Turks would do nothing, and that all the reforms promised by the Hatti-Humayun which he had obtained with so much labour and difficulty before the conclusion of the Crimean War would remain unexecuted and would be a dead letter. He considered that England had been betrayed at the Congress of Paris, that the clause in the treaty which embodied the Hatti-Humayun was nullified by the provision that its recognition did not entitle the Great Powers either collectively or separately to interfere in the internal affairs of Turkey. He held that this was fatal to the enforcement of the new reforms. He maintained that the only way to induce the Turks to act in accordance with them was through threats and fear, and that some external Power should bring such pressure to bear on them. This might be done by England alone, or by England in