If Sweden had been ready to make
such a demonstration with her gunboats on the coast of Russia, and had
asked us for our advice, the best thing we could have said would have
been, 'Don't do anything half so foolish; we are not prepared to send
an army and a fleet to defend you, and don't give Russia a cause to
attack you.' But there was another empire burning with desire to
join us against Russia. Turkey, we were told by the hon. and learned
member, with 200,000 cavalry, was ready to carry demonstration to the
very walls of St. Petersburg--perhaps to carry off the Emperor himself
from his throne. What was the state of Turkey then? In 1831 she had
engaged in a war with Russia, in which, after two campaigns, her arms
were repulsed and driven back into their own empire, so that she was
compelled at Adrianople to accept conditions of peace, hard in
their nature, and demanding a sacrifice of an important part of her
territory, but to which she was advised in friendly counsel by the
British Ambassador to submit, for fear of having to endure still
worse. We are told that, two or three years after this great disaster,
Turkey was of such amazing enterprise and courage, and was furnished
with such a wonderful quantity of cavalry, that she was prepared to
send 200,000 horse (which she never had in all her life) over the
frontiers of Russia, and sweep her territory. Now this is, of all
the wild dreams that ever crossed the mind of man, one of the most
unlikely and extraordinary.
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