The Tauride Palace in St Petersburg, begun in 1783. When Salisbury was Secretary of State for India, there were lively fears that the Russian Empire would use Afghanistan as a gateway to a conquest of British India. Napoleon had put Tsar Paul I up to attempting it seventy years earlier, but Alexander II’s state visit to London in 1874 had created warmer relations. (In 1894 Queen Victoria’s granddaughter Alix married Alexander’s grandson, the future Tsar Nicholas II – a rather better guarantee of peace than war.) Sadly, there are always some who gain power, win votes or even make a living by ensuring that fears are not calmed, opportunities are not taken, and wounds are not healed.
AS to our foreign policy I hardly dare to open the subject with you. If I took your gloomy view I should commence immediate enquiries as to the most painless form of suicide.
But I think you listen too much to the soldiers. No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.*
* As a maxim, ‘never trust experts’ does have its limitations, as the vestry of St Chad’s Church in Shrewsbury found when they invited surveyor Thomas Telford to provide an estimate for mending their leaky roof in 1788. See A False Economy.
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