Such was the hereditary British policy.
“It never entered into the mind of the politicians of those times, in order to bring the scale again to rights, to find out the happy expedient of raising a third naval Power for framing a juster balance in the Baltic.... Who has taken this counsel against Tyre, the crowning city, whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honourables of the earth? Ego autem neminem nomino, quare irasci mihi nemo poterit, nisi qui ante de se voluerit confiteri. ["But I name no one, so that no one will be angry with me, other than he who might refuse to express himself openly before the event.” Cicero] Posterity will be under some difficulty to believe that this could be the work of any of the persons now in power ... that we have opened St. Petersburg to the Czar solely at our own expense, and without any risk to him....”
The safest line of policy would be to return to the treaty of Stolbowa, and to suffer the Muscovite no longer “to nestle in the Baltic.” Yet, it may be said, that in “the present state of affairs” it would be “difficult to retrieve the advantage we have lost by not curbing, when it was more easy, the growth of the Muscovite power.