“’tis every way our interest to have the Swede restored to those provinces which the Muscovite has wrested from that crown in the Baltic. Great Britain can no longer hold the balance in that sea,” since she “has raised the Muscovite to be a maritime Power there... Had we performed the articles of our alliance made by King William with the crown of Sweden, that gallant nation would ever have been a bar strong enough against the Czar coming into the Baltic.... Time must confirm us, that the Muscovite’s expulsion from the Baltic is now the principal end of our Ministry.”
Footnotes from MECW
24 This letter, as well as other reports from British diplomats in Russia in 1736-39, was published, with the permission of the British Government, in full in Sbornik imperatorskogo rasshogo istoricheskogo obshchestvti (Records of the imperial Russian Historical Society), St. Petersburg, 1892, Vol. 80, pp. 13-19, from the original in the Public Record Office of Great Britain.
25 Marx is referring to the mediation offered by Britain and Holland in the Russo-Turkish war of 1735-39; it was rejected by Russia.