In 1830 Lord Holland, Fox’s nephew—it will be remembered that on March 29, 1791, Fox had said in the House of Commons he was proud of supporting Russia’s advance to the East, in opposition to William Pitt, who wanted to admit Turkey into the European concert—declared he was sorry, as “a citizen of the world,” that the Russians had not yet settled down in the Golden Horn. Besides, whereas the Tories felt some anxiety at the territorial development of Russia—without thinking of making use of Turkey to consolidate the position in the East—the Whigs, on the contrary, to use the words of Sir Robert Adair in 1842, thought they could bring the Muscovite Empire into the wake of the United Kingdom. In June, 1844, the Tsar himself came to London in order to induce Great Britain to approve his Eastern policy, and Russian diplomacy felt so confident she could rely on the support of the English Liberal Cabinet that in 1853 Nicholas I, in the overtures made to Sir Hamilton Seymour, expressed his conviction that he could settle the Turkish problem in ten minutes’ conversation with Lord Aberdeen. On June 4, 1878, Lord Beaconsfield, who looked upon the part of England in the East as that of a moral protectorate over Islam and a mediator between Europe and Asia, by ensuring the institution of a system of reforms, signed a treaty of alliance with Turkey, by which England pledged herself to protect the Porte against Russian greediness in Asia. Unfortunately, Mr. Gladstone, under the influence of the ideas we have already expounded,[49] soon reversed the Eastern policy of England and unconsciously made his country the Tsar’s ally against Turkey. Russia, to whom it was now impossible, since the Bulgarians and Rumanians were no longer under Ottoman dominion, to reach the shores of the Bosphorus through Thrace and to conquer Constantinople and the Straits, which had been the aim of her policy for centuries, then turned her designs towards Turkish Armenia and Anatolia, as we have just seen, in order to reach Constantinople through Asia. Tiutshev, in one of his poems entitled _Russian Geography_, said: “Moscow, Peter’s town, and Constantine’s town, are the three sacred capitals of the Russian Empire. But how far do its frontiers extend to the north and the east, to the south and the west? Fate will reveal it in the future. Seven inland seas and seven great rivers, from the Nile to the Neva, from the Elbe to China, from the Volga to the Euphrates, from the Ganges to the Danube—this is the Russian Empire, and it will last through untold centuries! So did the Spirit predict. So did Daniel prophesy!” And in another place: “Soon will the prophecy be fulfilled and the fateful time come! And in regenerated Byzantium the ancient vaults of St. Sophia will shelter Christ’s altar again. Kneel down before that altar, thou Russian Tsar, and rise, thou Tsar of all the Slavs.”