THE FIGHTING FIFTIES 127

But it was one thing to propose a compromise: another to
get two despotic and cunning orientals to accept it The Sultan
was resolved to keep his Christian provinces and to yield nothing.
The Czar was equally resolved to obtain the substance of his
ends, though, being anxious to obtain them if possible without
war, he was temporarily the more reasonable of the two. But
the Turk, seeing an opportunity of fighting a war (which he
regarded as sooner or later inevitable) with the backing of two
great Christian Powers, and, judging that such a chance might
never occur again, refused any compromise whatever.

Step by step the British Prime Minister, Lord Aberdeen, was
driven into a war which he deplored and whose results he dreaded.
Most of his Cabinet were men of peace like himself, but a small
war group led by Palmerston and Russell and strongly aided by
the British Ambassador to the Porte—Lord Stratford de Redcliffe
—drove him ever further into a position from which there was
no withdrawing. Public opinion, waking up to the fact that
the country was being flouted by a notorious despot, suddenly
became intensely bellicose. Aberdeen found it harder to retreat
than ever. A guarantee to the Turk, which had been intended as
provisional was imperceptibly transformed by that wilyoriental in-
to a document whose execution lay in Turkish, not British hands.

Without having any dear idea of what the struggle was
about except that it was against tyranny and without the govern-
ment having made any adequate preparations to conduct it, the
British people in the spring of 1854 found themselves, in alliance
with France and Turkey, and at war with-Russia. The country,
apparently so pacific a few years before, had completely changed
its outlook: John Morley in his free-trading, radical Lancashire
home, remembered hearing at his parental fireside heartfelt*
wishes that Cobden and Bright—still bravely advocating peace
—should be flung together into the insanitary waters of the
Lrwell. What was even more surprising was the alignment of
England beside the French "usurper," whose "foul lips"—in
contemporary radical parlance—actually kissed the cheeks of
Queen Victoria during a royal war-time visit to France.1 A few
far-seeing observers predicted that the war would be hard to
wage and impossible to bring to a successful conclusion, and that

1"When we read of this last indignity at Cherbourg, there was not an honest
woman's face in Britain that did not burn with shame." W. E. Adams, Memoirs of a
Social AtQTn> //, 3501.