text:  How differently would Pitt's cabinet have acted and how differently did it act! When the Russian councils menaced the seizure of even a paltry Turkish fortress on the Black Sea the great minister ordered a fleet to be ready as _his_ negotiators; and though the factiousness of Opposition at the time prevented this manly demonstration of policy and justice the evidence was given in the reign of Paul when a British fleet crushed the armed neutrality--that trick of French mountebanks imposing on the ambition of the north--and restored Russia to so full a sense of the power and the honour of England that she sent her fleet into her safe keeping at the approach of Napoleon's invasion and has been her fast and honourable ally ever since