The Sun.
London, England, 1853-07-12 00:00:00

COUNT NESSELRODE'S CIRCULAR NOTE.

The following dispatch, addressed by Count Nessel-
rode to the diplomatic agents of the Russian Govern-
ment, appeared in the Journal de St. Petersbourg of the
2d July

(TRANSLATION.)
"ST. PETERSBURGH (JUNE 20), JULY 2, 1853.
Sir,—My circular dispatch of the 30th of May last has
informed you of the rupture of our diplomatic relations
with the Ottoman Porte. It charged you to inform the
Cabinet to which you are accredited of the causes of com-
plaint which we have received from the Porte--of our un-
successful efforts to obtain satisfaction, and of the succes-
sive concessions which we have been led to make by our
desire to maintain with the Turkish Government kindly
and amicable relations. You know that having renounced
in him the idea of a guarantee obtained under the form
of a convention, sened, or other united (syuallagma-
tique) act we have reduced our demands to the sim-
ple signing of a simple note such as that of which
the text has been transmitted to you. You may
have seen that this note, independently of the
arrangements which specially relate to the Holy places,
includes substantially nothing else as regards the general
guarantee demanded in favour of religion than a simple
confirmation of that which we have long enjoyed. I have
called your attention to the fact that the signature of
this article constitutes, in the eyes of the Emperor, the
only real reparation which he can accept for the offence
committed against him by the violation of the firman of the
year 1852, as also of the personal promises which he at the
same time received from the Sultan. I have added that a
similar act was besides indispensable, since the obtaining
of new firmans, susceptible of being infringed as well as
the first, could no longer of itself alone offer us a sufficient
pledge for the future. Finally, 1 have not concealed from
you, that if, after eight days of reflection, the Ottoman
Porte refused to grant our demand, the Emperor would
feel himself under the obligation of having recourse—in
order to obtain satisfaction—to measures more decisive
than a simple interruption of the relations of the two
Governments.
" In submitting this ultimatum to the Porte we had
more particularly informed the leading cabinets of our in-
tentions. We had appealed to France and to Great Bri-
tain not to complicate by their attitude the difficulties of
the situation, and not to adopt too soon measures which,
on the one hand, might have the effect of encouraging
the opposition of the Porte ; and, on the other, of com-
promising still more than they already have been com-
promised in the question, the honour and dignity of the
Emperor.
" I regret to announce to you to-day that this double
attempt has unhappily been vain.
" The Porte, as you will see by the accompanying letter
of Reschid Pacha, has given to that which I had addressed
to him a negative, or at least an evasive answer.
"On the other hand the two maritime powers have not
thought it their duty to defer to the considerations which
we had recommended to their serious attention. Taking
the initiative before us, they have thought it indispensable
to adopt immediately an effective measure in advance of
those which we had only announced to them as purely con-
tingent (eventuelles), since we rendered their execution de-
pendent on the final resolutions of the Porte ; and oven at
the moment at which I write that execution has not as
yet commenced. They immediately sent their fleets to the
neighbourhood of Constantinople. They already occupied
the waters and the harbours of the Ottoman empire,
within reach of the Dardanelles. By this advanced posi-
tion the two powers have placed us under the weight of a
threatening demonstration, which, as we had forewarned
them, must have added new complications to the crisis.
" In the face of the refusal of the Porte, supported by
the demonstration of France and England, it becomes
more impossible for us than ever to modify the resolutions
announced by the Emperor.
" His Imperial Majesty, therefore, has just sent to the
body of our troops stationed at this moment in Bessarabia
the order to pass the frontier for the purpose of occupying
the Principalities.
" They entered them not for the purpose of waging
against the Porte an offensive war, which we shall, on the
contrary, avoid to the utmost of our power as long as it
shall not force us to it ; but because the Porte, in persist-
ing to refuse us the moral guarantee which we had a right
to expect, obliges us to substitute for it provisionally a
material guarantee, because the position which the two
powers have taken up in the harbours and the waters of
the Ottoman Empire, in view oven of its capital, not being
capable of being considered by us in the actual circum-
stances otherwise than as a maritime occupation gives us,
moreover, a reason for re-establishing the equilibrium of
our respective positions by means of a military occupation.
" We have, however, no intention of maintaining that
position longer than our interest or our honour shall re-
quire. It will be altogether temporary ; it will only serve
as a pledge until better councils shall have prevailed in
the minds of the Ministers of the Sultan. In occupying
the principalities for a time, we disavow beforehand
every idea of conquest. We do not pretend to obtain
any accession of territory. Knowingly and willingly we
will not seek to excite any rising amidst the Christian
population of Turkey. As soon as that power shall
have granted us the satisfaction which is due to us, and
as soon, at the same time as the pressure which the at-
titude which the maritime powers exercises on us shall
cease, our troops will re-enter, at that very instant,
within the limits of Russia. As to the inhabitants of the
principalities, the presence of our forces will subject
them to no new charges or contributions. The articles
with which they may furnish us shall ba paid for out of
our military chest at the opportune moment, and at a rate
fixed upon beforehand with their Government. The prin-
ciples and the rules of conduct which we have prescribed
to ourselves upon this subject you will find laid down in
the annexed proclamation, which General Prince Gortcha-
koff, chief of the army of occupation, has been directed to
publish on his entry into the two provinces.
"We do not, Sir, at all conceal from ourselves how
much meaning there is in the attitude which we assume,
and what may ultimately become its consequences, if the
Turkish Government obliges us to pass beyond the narrow
and limited circle within which we desire to confine our-
selves. But the position in which that Government
places us by driving matters to extremity, by refusing us
every legitimate satisfaction, by not reciprocating by any
concessions whatever all those concessions which Prince
Menschikoff had successively made with respect to the form
as well as the original basis of our propositions, leaves us
no other course to adopt. More than that—the princi-
ples so peremptorily laid down in spite of the moderation
of the language of the letters written in reply to Redschid
Pacha, as well as in his note of the 26th May last, to the
representatives of the four powers at Constantinople, would
lead to nothing less, if they were to be taken literally, than
to bring into question all our required rights, and to nul-
lify all our preceding transactions.
" In effect, if the Ottoman Government regards, as con-
trary to its independence and to its rights of sovereignty,
any diplomatic engagement whatever, even under the form
of a simple note, in which the point at issue would be to
stipulate with a foreign government for the security of
religion and the churches, what becomes of the engage-
ment which it formerly contracted with us under a form
far more obligatory to protect in its states our religion and
churches ?
" However little we might admit a principle so abso-
lute, we should in doing so bear up with our own hands
the treaty of Kainardji, as well as those which confirm it,
and voluntarily abandon the right which they have con-
ferred upon us to take care that the Greek worship should
be effectually protected in Turkey.
"Is that what the Porte means ? Does it intend to free
itself from all its preceding obligations, and to make the
actual crisis result in the abolition for ever of a whole
order of relations which time had consecrated ?
" Impartial Europe will understand that if the question
were placed on those terms, it would become for Russia,
in spite of the most conciliatory intentions, incapable of a
pacific solution ; because the issue would involve for us our
treaties, our secular influence, our moral credit, our dearest
sentiments, national and religious.
" Let us be permitted to say it—the actual dispute, and
all the noisy distinction which it has received from the
press outside of cabinets, rest upon a mere misunderstand.

. ----
ing, or upon a want of sufficient attention to all our politi.
cal antecedents.

"People seem not to be aware, or to lose sight of the
fact that Russia virtually enjoys, by position and by
treaty, an ancient right to watch over the efficacious pro-
tection of its religion in the East ; and people represent
the maintenance of this ancient right, which she could not
abandon, as an act which involves a totally new preten-
sion to a protectorate at once religious and politic, of
which the meaning and the consequences for the future are
exaggerated.
" It is upon this miserable misunderstanding that the
whole crisis at this moment depends.
" The bearing and the consequences of our pretended new
political protectorate have no real existence. We demand

for our co-religionists in the East only the strict status quo
—only the preservation of the privileges which they pos-
sessed ab antique under the aegis of thir sovereign. We
do not deny that there will result from this in favour of
Russia what may be justly called a religious patronage—•
which we have from time immemorial exercised in the
East. Now, if up to this time the independence and the
Sovereignty of Turkey have been reconciled with the ex-
ercise of this patronage, why should either the one or the
other suffer for the future, since our pretensions reduce
themselves to that which is in reality only a confirmation?
" We have said, and we repeat, the Emperor wishes not
to-day what he did not wish in former times, to overturn
the Ottoman Empire, or to aggrandise himself at its ex-
pense. After the very moderate use which ho made in 1829
of the victory of Adrianople, when that victory placed the
Porte at his mercy—after having, singly, in Europe, saved
Turkey, in 1833, from inevitable dismemberment—after
having, in 1839, taken, with other powers, the initia-
tive in making propositions which, carried out in
common, once more saved his throne by giving place to a
new Arabian empire—it would be rather fastidious to
give proofs of this fact. On the contrary, the fundamental
principle of the policy of our august Emperor has always
been to maintain as long as possible the actual status quo
of the East. He has always desired, and he desires still, 1
because such is really the well-understood interest of
Russia—already too vast to require an extension of terri-
tory—because, prosperous, peaceable, inoffensive, the Otto-
man empire checks the shock of rivalries, which, if it should
fall, would immediately. wound each other in their
struggle for the possession of her ruins—because hu-
man foresight would in vain search for combination pro-
per to fill the void which would be left in the political
balance, by the disappearance of the great body. But if
such are the real, avowed, and sincere views of the
Emperor, in order that ho may be enabled to be faithful
to them, it is necessary also that Turkey should act to-
wards us in a manner that offers to us the possibility of
co-existing with her ; that she respects our private treaties
and the consequences resulting from them ; that the acts
of bad faith, of secret persecution, of perpetual vexation,
practised against our religion, place us in a situation
which, intolerable long to endure, will force us to confide
for a remedy to the blind chances of hazard.
" Such are, Sir, the considerations that you are charged
to lay before the government of ----, in bringing
under its notice, by the present dispatch, the resolutions
and iatentions of his Majesty the Emperor.
" Receive, Sir, &c.
(Signed)
( Front the Times. )
The Russian Government has followed up its circular
dispatch of the 11th of May and its manifesto to the

" NESSELRODE."