Donald Mackenzie Wallace

“ Accordingly, when Lord Salisbury proposed energetic action to protect the Armenians, the cabinet of St Petersburg suddenly assumed the rôle of protector of the sultan and vetoed the proposal. At the same time efforts were made to weaken the Triple Alliance, the principal instrument employed being the entente with France, which Prince Lobanov helped to convert into a formal alliance between the two powers. In the Far East he was not less active, and became the protector of China in the same sense as he had shown himself the protector of Turkey. ”

“ LOBANOV-ROSTOVSKI, ALEXIS BORISOVICH, Prince (1824–1896) , Russian statesman, was born on the 30th of December 1824, and educated, like Prince Gorchakov and so many other eminent Russians, at the lyceum of Tsarskoe Selo. At the age of twenty he entered the diplomatic service, and became minister at Constantinople in 1859. In 1863 a regrettable incident in his private life made him retire temporarily from the public service, but four years later he re-entered it and served for ten years as adlatus to the minister of the interior. ”

“ But as soon as he became minister of foreign affairs, Russian influence in the Balkan Peninsula suddenly revived. Servia received financial assistance; a large consignment of arms was sent openly from St Petersburg to the prince of Montenegro; Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria became ostensibly reconciled with the Russian emperor, and his son Boris was received into the Eastern Orthodox Church; the Russian embassy at Constantinople tried to bring about a reconciliation between the Bulgarian exarch and the oecumenical patriarch ”