It was truly a bold plan; it did not even fail to violently shock the French feelings. Was it not in truth to erase with a single stroke a past of ten years, to lose all the fruit of the Crimean war? They had some repugnance in avowing to themselves that the treaty of 1856 had not existed for a long time, alas! since the day when the French government had broken by its gratuitous kindness towards Russia this cluster of the three great Occidental Powers which alone could assure its efficacious execution. Since then the act had gradually become void, had been violated in the majority of the stipulations; and the conference of Paris, charged nominally with watching over the observance of the treaty, was always restricted, as the Austrian dispatch observed, "in giving its sanction to facts accomplished outside of its sphere of action, and which were not in harmony with the agreements placed under its protection." However, on the day after Sadowa, Prince Gortchakof did not fail to seize the first opportunity to begin to prepare the epitaph of the treaty of Paris. "Our august master," said the Russian chancellor in a document dated the 20th August, 1866, and marked by fine irony,--"our august master does not intend to insist on the general engagements of the treaties _which have no value except by reason of the accord existing between the great Powers in order to make them respected_, and which to-day have received, by _the want of this joint will_, too frequent and too severe blows not to be rendered _invalid_." It was exactly this _collective will_ which M. de Beust expected to revive and strengthen in projecting the revision of the act of 1856. According to his opinion, the treaty of Paris had not attained its purpose, which was to insure the entireness and the vitality of the Ottoman empire. On one side the Occidental Powers have imposed on Russia on the banks of the Euxine a restriction of its rights of sovereignty which a great empire could not definitely accept, and from which sooner or later it would seek to free itself. On the other side, and as regards the Christian population of the Levant, they contented themselves with promulgating a firman promising reforms, and leaving Turkey to itself, instead of reserving for Europe the right to watch over the Ottoman government with a gentle but continued vigilance, so that it should fulfill its duties toward the rajahs, and by a wise and honest administration become independent and strong. The treaty of Paris had only, thought the Austrian minister, given to Russia what the Crimean war ought to have refused it above all,--the monopoly of influence over the rajahs; this monopoly it continued to exercise as in the past, in a hidden manner, it is true, but so much the more dangerously as it recognized no competition. M. de Beust wished to reëstablish the competition, or rather he wished to establish a general agreement "to make the Christian populations of the sultan _the debtors of all Europe_, in giving them, by the care of all the guaranteeing courts, autonomous institutions according to the diversity of religions and races,"[101] and he hesitated the less to make to this vast conception the sacrifice of the article of the treaty of Paris touching the neutralization of the Black Sea which Austria had combated from the beginning, and to which it had only given its adherence at the last moment to humor the Occidental Powers and put an end to the Crimean war, the events of which had since demonstrated its complete inefficacy. It was under the influence of the disaster of Sinopa that France and England had hoped to restrain the naval forces of the czar in the Euxine. They had thus thought to shelter Constantinople from a blow from the Russian hand; but on this point, as on so many others, the physiognomy of the Orient had essentially changed. Russia no longer meditated a _coup de main_: it advanced more slowly, but much more surely, towards its goal. The pacification of the Caucasus[102] the irremediable weakness of the Porte and the daily increasing discontent of the rajahs, as impatient of the Turkish yoke as they were devoted to their sole protector, the czar, were worth to it all the vessels of the Black Sea. "However, have they really freed Constantinople from all danger on that side?" asked the Austrian minister.