deners are never bad subjects. Sweden will encourage agriculture, plantation, and fishery. The latter is the most fertile of her possessions, and wants no garrisons or encampments. These occupations will deaden excitability to war, without injuring the moral and physical force by which, whenever it is necessary, it may be supported. But she appears to me farther removed from such a necessity than any other nation in the world, and your Majesty may calculate, for the remainder of your life, on her neutrality. One argument answers all objections. If they all agreed that Naples should be invaded, when not a single act of violence had been committed, because the Neapolitans were turbulent, how greatly more forcible is the reason, when a more powerful nation is not only more turbulent, but when the same principles as those of the Neapolitans are in action on one side, and a fanaticism in hostility to Christianity on the other! Your Majesty is head of the Greek church: bishops and patriarchs have been massacred by the Mahometans. It becomes not your dignity to listen to any accommodation on such outrages. You might have pardoned (which would have been too much) the insult offered to your embassador; you might have yielded to the entreaties of your allies, in forbear ing from the same steps as had been taken by Austria; you might have permitted the aggrandisement of that powerful neighbour; but you cannot abandon the church of God, placed under your especial care and sole protection. ALEXANDER. Capo d'Istria! is it you who talk so? CAPO D'ISTRIA. No; it is your Majesty. ALEXANDER. My armies cannot stirr in this season of the year; the Turks can march all winter. CAPO D'ISTRIA. Let them: we shall have occupation enough in preparing stores and shewing our sincerity. We shall be compelled into the war when we are ready. Wait only until after the Ramadan: the fierceness of the Turks will subside by fasting, and differences will arise between the European and Asiatic troops. ALEXANDER. We cannot speculate on the latter case, and our soldiers also will fast... CAPO D'ISTRIA. Or not; as your Majesty pleases. The Christian is the only religion, old or new, in which individuals and nations can dispense, by another's per mission, with their bounden duties; such are fasts, curtesies, crosses, genuflexions, processions, and other bodily functions. ALEXANDER. This would be a religious war; and Islamism may send into the field half a million of combatants. CAPO D'ISTRIA. Then is victory ours. Devastated provinces cannot furnish provisions to one-third of the number in one body, and they would fight not for articles of faith, but for articles of food, Turk against Turk, not against Greek and Russian. He who has the best commissariate has the strongest army. Your Majesty can bring into the field as large a force as the enemy, a force better disciplined and better supplied: hence the main body will be more numerous; and with the main body the business of the war will be effected. March directly for Constantinople. All great empires have been lost and gained by one battle, your own excepted. The conquest of the Ottoman will be atchieved by one: twenty would not win Rhodes. He who ruined the Persians at Marathon was repulsed from the little rock of Paros. I beg your Majesty's pardon for such an offence against the dignity of diplomacy, as a quotation of ancient history, at a time when the world abounds with young attachés à la legation, all braver than Miltiades, all more eloquent than Herodotus, all more virtuous than Aristides, and all more wise than Solon. Your Majesty smiles. I have heard their patrons swear it upon their honour. ALEXANDER. The very thing on which such an oath should be sworne; the altar is worthy of the offering, and the offering of the altar. CAPO D'ISTRIA. A great encounter within sight of Constantinople throws the most distant dominions of the sultan into your hands: Selim, the Prophet, and Fate bend before you. Precedents are good for all, even for Russia: but Russia has great advantages, which other powers have never had, and never will have. Remember, now and for ever, that she alone can play deep at every table and stake nothing. |