Britain, London.
The British Government had learned of the Warsaw Uprising long ago, but Prime Minister the Earl of Derby was not optimistic. He did not particularly want to provoke the Russians at a time when Britain already had more than enough troubles.
The domestic financial crisis, industrial slump, cooling railway industry, incurable Potato Late Blight that kept spreading, the Irish, the Chartists, and unemployed workers were already giving him a monstrous headache.
Recently, Potato Late Blight had spread to Scotland. This time, the local officials and the media still wanted to use the same arguments they had used against the Irish, portraying the natural disaster as punishment for the immoral and lazy.
But the Scots were not the Irish. The former had a far stronger spirit of resistance than the latter, and Scotland had armed forces of its own.
When it came to a brother with a knife in his hand, the British Government was naturally willing to speak civilly. First, it dismissed several officials and journalists who had talked too much, then it began increasing aid to Scotland.
This time, the British Government did not set up poorhouses or offer fake work relief. Instead, it handed out money and food directly, and that was what finally soothed the Scots' anger.
But there was a price to pay. The British Government, already buried under debt, was now in an even worse predicament.
So the Earl of Derby truly did not want to get tangled up in the great trouble that was Poland. If he could have, he would not even have wanted to hear about it.
The other members of Britain's upper ranks, however, did not see things that way. They believed Russia's wholesale encroachment on the Ottoman Empire and Central Asia had seriously harmed the interests of the