THE WAR OF GREEK INDEPENDENCE 1821 TO 1833 BY W.ALISON PHILLIPS 1897

THE PROTOCOL OF MARCH 22 313
Russia had no desire to see the Greek question settled
before she herself was in a position to
wring terms
out of the Sultan, and would have preferred to postpone
the whole matter until she could make peace.
The diplomatic pedantry, or the short-sighted policy,
of Lord Aberdeen, played into the hands of the
Russians. He consented, indeed, in order to keep on
good terms with France, to sign the protocol;
but he
insisted at the same time on a diplomatic procedure
which ended by postponing the whole question, until
the result
of her second campaign
made Russia the
(
sole judge. While Capodistrias was intriguing,
while Sultan Mahrnoud was fuming with rage, and
while the population of Greece was perishing from
misery, the English Foreign Secretary
insisted on
reserving to each of the Allied Courts the right of
weighing separately the objections which the indignant
Sultan might make to the proposed arrangements/
1 Under these circumstances the judgment
passed by Metternich on the work of the Allies was
neither unjust nor untrue. He saw that the protocol
was less concerned with the welfare of the Greeks than
with the desire to arrange a modus mvendi for the
'
'
Concert. The Triple Alliance/ he said, can live on
the protocol for a year;
but the Alliance itself is
i Finlay, ii. 222.