Foreign Policy was, however, the mainstay of the Ministry, and it is curious to note how completely the anti-Turkish agitation, which Mr. Gladstone had fomented with passionate zeal, forced the Cabinet to change their attitude to the Eastern Question. In 1876 the Ministerial doctrine was that England had no more to do with a quarrel between the Sultan and his subjects than between the Austrian Emperor and his people--the Ministerial theory, in fact, was, that if England was bound to protect anybody, it was the Sultan, and not his subjects. In 1877 Ministers acknowledged that, as England had been mainly responsible for keeping the Turk in Europe, she was in honour bound to protect his Christian subjects from the torture which his Pashas inflicted on them. There was also a change in regard to another point. In 1876 Ministers were all for maintaining the “integrity and independence” of Turkey. The Atrocities agitation, however, forced Lord Derby to make demands on Turkey, and to assent to demands being made on her, which ignored her visionary integrity and her mythical independence. It was said at the time that the Court, having strongly supported the pro-Turkish policy of 1876, was disappointed at the change of front in 1877. It is quite certain that these views were not shared by the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh and their _entourage_. A passage in one of the letters of the Princess Alice to the Queen makes that point tolerably clear.[108] But as to the other question the evidence is faulty. The policy of the Prince Consort, which was always supposed to dominate the ideas of the Court, was certainly not pro-Turkish. In his celebrated Memorandum to Lord Aberdeen’s Cabinet in 1853 he laid down two principles: It was the duty and interest of England to prevent Russia from imposing in an underhand way a Protectorate on the European provinces of Turkey “incompatible with their own independence.” It was also the duty and interest of England to prevent Turkey from using English diplomacy so as to enable the Pashas to impose “a more oppressive rule of two millions of fanatic Mussulmans over twelve millions of Christians.” England might go to war to prevent Bulgaria from falling into the hands of Russia, but not for the mere maintenance of the integrity and independence of Turkey. Nay, the Prince considered that such a war ought to lead, in the peace which must be its object, “to the obtaining of arrangements more consonant with the well-understood interests of Europe, of Christianity, liberty, and civilisation, than the re-imposition of the ignorant barbarian and despotic yoke of the Mussulman over the most fertile and favoured portion of Europe.”[109] Lord Aberdeen, Lord Clarendon, Sir James Graham, and Mr. Gladstone accepted this view of English policy. On the other hand, Lord Palmerston repudiated it. He contended that it was the duty of England to maintain the integrity of Turkey at all hazards; that the Prince Consort’s policy pointed to the ultimate expulsion of the Ottomans from Europe; and that any reconstruction of Turkey such as that which the Prince foreshadowed simply meant “its subjection to Russia, direct or indirect, immediate or for a time delayed.”