THE present volume forms a sequel to a book (still unpublished)
entitled Britain in Europe, in which I attempt to give a connected
survey of British foreign policy in the nineteenth century: and the
germ of both is to be found in a course of lectures delivered at the
University of London, King's College, in 1927 and again in 1930.
When I reached the year 1874, a double motive led me to adopt new
methods and an altogether larger scale. In the first place, the Eastern
crisis of the seventies, to an even greater degree than the Crimean
War, illustrates the essential interaction of home and foreign policy,
the bearings of remote happenings in eastern Europe upon British
party government, and the resultant dangers for the peace of the
nation and the world: and yet its history has remained unwritten
for over fifty years. In the second place, a happy chance enabled
me to obtain access to a mass of unpublished Russian correspondence
and thus to study those innermost secrets of the Tsar, his Chancellor
and his Ambassadors, which were denied to contemporary English-
men. The Disraeli and Salisbury Papers have already been made
accessible, but in each case the aim was to interpret the standpoint
of a single man and a single country, rather than to correlate or com-
pare that standpoint with foreign sources. And yet it may reasonably
be claimed that if Lords Beaconsfield, Salisbury and Derby could in
1875-8 have seen into the cards which I am now placing upon the
table for the first time, their outlook towards Russia, and so towards
the Eastern Question, would have been radically different.

I was thus led by gradual stages to attempt to construct a narra-
tive in which not only the statesmen in whose hands British policy
lay, but also their political opponents, the diplomatists with whom
they had to deal and the foreign statesmen whose policies they sought
to counter or whose alliance they courted, would all figure, and their
relative importance at each stage of the crisis would be revealed, so
far as possible from their own words or from the comments of their
contemporaries. The major parts in the drama belong as of right to
Disraeli and Gladstone, to Derby, Salisbury and Queen Victoria, but
the key to the plot will often be found to lie with Shuvalov and
Gorchakov, with Bismarck and Andrássy, with Elliot and Layard,

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