The new volume of the " Life of the Prince
Consort,"—one remarkable memorandum of Baron Stockmar's in which we notice elsewhere,—contains a striking evidence of the Prince Consort's grasp of the Eastern Question. In a memorandum which was submitted to the Cabinet in 1853, and in which he admitted that it might be right and wise to go to war to prevent Con- stantinople and the Turkish territory from falling into the hands of Russia, he went on :—"This would be a war not for the main- tenance of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, but merely for the interests of the European powers of civilisation. It ought to be carried on unshackled by obligations to the Porte, and will probably lead, in the Peace which must be the object of that war, to the obtaining of arrangements more consonant with the well-understood interests of Europe, of Christianity, liberty, and civilisation, than the reimposition of the ignorant, barbarous, and despotic yoke of the Mussulman over the most fertile and favoured portion of Europe." If the Prince's conception of the true peace had been worked out, we should not now be solving painfully the problem which we then shirked.
