MR. GLADSTONE AND AUSTRIA.
MR. GLADSTONE has this week put the climax on his offences. He has presumed to reply to the Emperor of Austria, and to intimate that the Austrian Government, though far more lenient than of old at home, has never been anything but repressive abroad, and he is cursed aloud. He is not much hurt, as it happens, but the intention is to throw vitriol in his
face. The Tories have always had a certain liking for Austria, as a State in which great nobles are almost beyond the ldw, and they have of late taken to an adulation of monarchs not,
on their principles, precisely explicable. Their central idea is
that a hierarchy should exist in every society, but that every one is equally honourable in his own place, and a King who oppressed received at their hands as little mercy as a peasant who encroached. Now, however, Sovereigns are sacred, and a reply to a Sovereign—for after all, it is evident, from Sir H.
Elliot's telegrams, that the Emperor of Austria did say very nearly what Mr. Gladstone thought he said—is very nearly sacri- lege. As for sharp criticism on him, it is something too mon- strous, especially in the minds of Tory Ministers who do not scruple for an instant to say that the Emperor of Russia, quite as big a personage in the world, and much more important to us, as a great Asiatic Power, is one of the most evil despots who ever oppressed mankind. It is a little contemptible, all that, and a little sad, because it marks the deterioration in manliness and self-respect which six years of shrinking bluster have pro- duced in a great historic party ; but we should not have thought of alluding to it, but that many grave politicians think Mr.
Gladstone made a mistake in even appearing to rebuke Austrian ambition. Austria, they say, is a decent Power enough now, and her Government, or rather her reign- ing family, has an art of keeping provinces and nation- alities together, which may make them very useful in the settlement of the Eastern Question. It was a pity for Mr. Gladstone to rate them, though a Premier of England is the equal of any Emperor, when Austria may be needed as the only alternative to Russia in the Balkans. It is well, they say, to be civil to possible allies, even though their alliance should only be accepted as a Bernier ressort.
We are not particularly concerned to answer that idea of the historic position of the Hapsburgs, though we regard it as in the main untrue. Their history is, we should say, a history of failure to at ach nationalities. They were suzerains of Switzerland, and became so hated that the Swiss not only revolted, but ever after recounted a grotesque legend of inso- lent oppression as apology for their revolt. They reigned long in the Netherlands, only to create a dangerous insurrec- tion and a hatred which made the seizure of those provinces easy to France. They reigned over Northern Italy, and were so hated that a race rather given to submission resisted them for a hundred years. They occupied the Principalities, and the Roumanians declared that they would perish rather than be subjected to their dominion. They were first for centuries in Germany, with forty times the prestige of the Hohenzollerns, and the Germans exulted when they were gone. They were Kings of Hungary, and the Magyars were in perpetual revolt, and at last drove them out, and were only re-subjugated by Russia, and are now only obedient at the price of an equality in the Empire which is wholly artificial, and will harily last. With every advantage of situation in their favour,and a position which Mr. Gladstone once truly described as indispensable to Europe, they have barely succeeded in keeping together a federation, and have not built up either a nation or an empire. The reason is exactly what Mr. Gladstone said,—that with many good qualities at home, the principal one being that they alone among the Sovereigns of Europe cordially like and sympathise with the people of their capital and its neighbouring provinces, they are addicted to oppression abroad, and with no particular intention of being tyrannical, in proportion to the distance of their subjects from Vienna do acts which have precisely the same effect. They will not take trouble to secure justice, or bear with idiosyncracies, and though willing to govern like the Archdukes in Tuscany, seldom fail to get hated, as they did in Venetia and Lombardy.
The Hapsburgs are going down now into the Balkan penin- sula, and what is the prospect I There never was such a chance for anybody. The people of the peninsula, certain conditions being granted, are willing to welcome any rule that will save them at once from Turkish and Russian domin- ation,—from living under a harrow, or sinking into a morass. All Europe is hungering for any solution that promises to be permanent. The German statesmen would willingly help the Austrians to the whole territory,—possibly for a compensation. The Hapsburgs themselves have acquired without striking a blow the two most beautiful of all the Balkan provinces, and the two which, Dalmatia being their coast-land, suit the organisa- tion of Austria best. There is hardly in Europe a State such as Dalmatia-Bosnia-Herzegovina might, with a little patience and
good government, become. A second-rate Anglo-Indian administrator, acting on the ordinary ideas Englishmen apply to dependencies, would in twenty years make of the triune province, with its brave population, splendid harbours, and endless natural resources, a kingdom thoroughly able to pro- tect its own. No one in all Europe objected ter the Haps- burg's aggrandising themselves there, and yet what is the result of it all ? Mr. Arthur Evans, who knows the region so well, declares that by dint of sheer stupidity and want of sym- pathy and militarism, the Hapsburgs are binding together the nationalities in their new possession in the strong cohesion of hate. The Mahommedans are actually sympathising with the Christians, and both with Servians and Bulgarians, in the conviction that anything is better than Austrian suzerainty. The Government, he declares, have remedied none of the great evils, except the external disorder. They have exasperated the agrarian difficulty, in the interest of the Mahommedan landlords, till the Christian tenantry have fallen back on assassin- ation, and it comes to this,—that the freeholder receives no rent and the tenant no security. The national aspirations of the people, who are Serbs before all things, are not soothed away, but treated as offences, the dislike being carried so far that the Serbian letters, the Cyrillian character, which both Mahommedan and Orthodox understand, is proscribed in favour of the Roman alphabet, which nobody, whether master or sub- ject, uses naturally. Education is to be granted on the prin- ciple that German shall be obligatory, " and the masters corporals in the Army." The history of Serbia is proscribed, and native schoolmasters rejected because they are Serbs. The people have not even personal freedom and comfort, in exchange for their ideals :—
‘‘ Many of the officials are absolutely ignorant of the language of the country. Most of them hold the people in absolute contempt, and treat them like cattle. The customs and prejudices of the natives are violated, as much from want of knowledge as from a sublime indifference to their existence. Not a day passes but some fresh wound is inflicted on the susceptibilities of the population. To take the single instance of the Herzegovinian town of Trebinje, within a few miles of which I reside. The commandant there, whose inability to make himself intelligible to the natives belies an other- wise Slavonic name, has succeeded in embittering, in the most im- partial way, all classes of the citizens. One day, the fancy took him of improving the town by widening the main street. With military precision, he threw down the two existing rows of houses, and refused all compensation to the proprietors. As a further embellishment, be ordered the soldiers to convert the cemetery outside the town into a public garden. The improvement went on with a vengeance. The bones and turbaned tombstones of True Believers were soon tossed hither and thither by the Giaour soldiers, and the fury of the Turks may be imagined. A Serb merchant from Ragusa built a large house outside the town, on a plot of land which he had purchased for the purpose, and surrounded it with a garden-wall. When the whole was finished, the commandant summoned the too enterprising settler to his presence, and ordered him, in the roughest manner, to pull down the wall, and set up iron railings in its place. The poor man pleaded the expense, and demanded the reason of such an extraordinary order. The martinet refused to give any reason. The Serb threat. ened to appeal to the higher powers. 'Appeal, if you like,' replied the petty tyrant, but it will take you at least six months to get my order cancelled, and meanwhile I shall close your house and shop.' But pages might be filled with similar incidents from this single town. The last petty piece of tyranny on the part of the com- mandant has been an order forbidding the citizens to play the guzla,' the national lyre, to whose strains the Serbs have been wont to sing their epic lays through four centuries of Turkish rule. I have not yet learnt that the commandant has banished the Serbian fairies from the haunted glens of the neighbouring mountains."
So intense is the irritation produced by all this petty tyranny, tyranny which at home in Vienna is utterly unlike the easy- going Austrian, that the Hapsburgs are compelled, in default of Christian support, to fall back upon the old dominant caste, and place the Turks at the top :—" Only a short time since, the Duke of Wiirtemberg, in laying down certain principles of conduct for one of his new official agents, made use of these words, the literal accuracy of which I guarantee,—' The Catholics,' said the Austrian Governor of Bosnia, ' are too small a minority for us to rely upon ; the bulk of the people is Serb, but the Serbs are our mortal enemies. We must lean upon the Turks for our support' (Wir tniissen uns auf den
Tiirken stiitzen). Austria,' he continued, 'has plenty of other nationalities, why should she not have a Turkish nation- ality as well under her rule ?' " The very object of the transfer, the extinction of the Turkish ascendancy, is in danger.
These are all exaggerations ? That is quite possible, though Mr. Evans is a good observer, though we have heard all his statements and a great deal more from an English resident in Bosnia unconnected with him, though we note incessant reports of rioting, and though we who write defended the
transfer of the province to Austria as the only chance of liberat- ing it without anarchy. But grant that there is exaggeration, that many of the Austrian failures, particularly as regards the tenure, are only our own failures in Ireland, and that part of the favour shown to the Mahommedans is the result of the strange legal condition of the province, in which the Emperor of Austria, like our own Queen in Cyprus, is a vassal, without permission to put his own head ou the coinage, and still the broad fact remains. The Hapsburgs are governing Bosnia harshly, as they did Lombardy, not sympathetically, as they do Vienna ; are repressing instead of fostering the national feelings, which if fostered might make of European Turkey a Federation of the Balkans as free of the Czar as of the Sultan. That is all Mr. Gladstone has said, though he has said it in lofty language, and speaks as men speak whose words are forces; and if an English Premier out of power may not say that much, may not even hope that a great group of States will obtain a free existence, may not prefer publicly one policy to another and that an inferior one, then there is, as regards foreign policy, little advantage to England in possessing statesmen at all. If we are all to obey Austria without discussion, and apologise for any utterance Austria dislikes, and say,"Fie, fie !" if any one breathes a wish for more information about Austrian designs, the sooner states- men are silent the better. The Times can transmit Austrian orders with sufficient explicitness and entire cordiality. Only suppose, to gain the Eastern half of the Balkans, with Greece as a dependency, Austria joins Russia, as she did to divide Poland ! Would not Mr. Gladstone's outspoken warning be regretted then, and he thought to have been quite within tl.e limit of his right ?
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