ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes the policy pursued by Lord Beaconsfield before and during the Congress of Berlin. The sole acquisition in Europe obtained by Russia under the Treaty of Berlin was the strip of Bessarabia retroceded to Roumania in 1856 and now (1878), by an act of grave impolicy and base ingratitude, snatched away from her. Roumania was bitterly chagrined, but Lord Beaconsfield, while professing platonic sympathy, refused to be diverted from more important issues. The enduring significance of the Treaty of Berlin is not only that it frustrated the designs of Russia, nor that it preserved to the Sultan a remnant of the Ottoman Empire in Europe, but that it left the door open to the development of the newly reborn Nation-States that were arising upon the ruins of that empire under which for five centuries or more they had been submerged.
