THE present Emperor of Russia is not the one with whom we made the war.* He is a man not given to military display. He is a man whose reign before this war* was signalised chiefly by the grand act of the liberation of twenty millions of his people.* He at least was willing to forget the unfortunate past. He consented that his only daughter, the loved child of his heart, should marry the son of the English Queen.* And I thought that this was a great sign of a permanent reconciliation, and a very blessed promise of a prolonged peace; and although that has not borne in this political respect all the fruit one could have wished for, still I am delighted to believe that there is a great change growing, and a change for the better, and a change which I believe will be accelerated by what will take place when this unfortunate war comes to an end.*
* ‘The war’ is The Crimean War of 1853-1856, about which Bright had been speaking at length earlier. It began when Emperor Nicholas I (r. 1825-1855) was on the Russian throne; the current Emperor was Alexander II of Russia (r. 1855-1881).
* ‘This war’ is the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. Bright delivered this speech on January 13th, 1878, towards the close of the war; Parliament was currently discussing whether to step in on Turkey’s side and Bright, of course, was wholly against it.
* The Emancipation of the Serfs was signed into law on February 19th OS (March 3rd NS), 1861, ending Russia’s centuries-old feudal society and granting to some twenty-three million agricultural labourers rights of property ownership, marriage and private enterprise they had long been denied. It was in essence that country’s abolition of slavery, thankfully achieved without the bloodshed seen in the American Civil War of 1861-1865. Much of the reform was reversed by the Communists after 1917, who sent the whole country back to the Middle Ages but without the consolation of religion.
* Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna of Russia married Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, on January 24th, 1874. Alfred’s sister Princess Alice was the mother of Empress Alexandra, consort of Emperor Nicholas II of Russia, and also of St Elizabeth the New Martyr.
* The Russo-Turkish war ended with the Treaty of Berlin on July 13, 1878. It was a victory for Russia, and for the Christian states in the Balkans that thereby gained independence from what had become a very unpleasant subservience to the Ottoman Empire.