TOPICS OF THE DAY.
LORD DERBY'S THOUGHTS ON TURKEY.
IT is not often easy to gather the true sentiments of a Government, even a British Government, from its pub- lished despatches. Until war is immediately at hand, and confidential documents, like Sir Hamilton Seymour's report of his conversations with Czar Nicholas, are published, or allowed by a serviceable indiscretion to appear, the ruling thoughts of Governments in foreign affairs are kept very carefully con- cealed. British Foreign Ministers know that Continental Foreign Ministers resent publicity, they are not desirous them- selves of much criticism by an ill-informed Parliament, and they are afraid of being told by their interlocutors on the Con- tinent that the country does not heartily support their views. They are, too, hampered by the necessity of protecting agents, whose power of obtaining information would be destroyed if their bias were accurately known. They edit papers, there- fore, somewhat severely, suppress short notes which would tell us much more than despatches, and leave the instructed section of the public to gather the truth as they can by reading be- tween the lines. Still they sometimes publish accidentally en- closures which reveal a great deal, and they usually afford some clues to the general drift of their policy, and both these state- ments are true of the Turkish papers recently presented to Par- liament. No one who reads them carefully can, we think, doubt that Lord Derby is hostile to the concession of autonomy to the Turkish provinces, unless, indeed, they conquer it with the sword ; and that his general policy is that if the Turks prevail, which he regards as nearly certain, the Turkish Empire should remain unbroken and directly governed by Turkish Pashas, the Christians being compelled to remain contented with the kind of protection afforded them in Crete,—that is, with muni- cipal liberties which the Cretans declare to be utterly insuffi- cient and unreal.
The policy of Lord Derby begins to be clear after the rejec- tion of the Berlin Note. The three Imperial Chancellors evidently drew up this Note under an impression that England was out of the field of active diplomacy, for they intimated quite clearly—though they afterwards denied this—that they expected the adhesion of England, Prance, and Italy by tele- graph. France and Italy, fancying themselves alone, did, indeed, comply with this order, a concession of which the Due Decazes was afterwards bitterly ashamed. Lord Derby, however, who was undoubtedly, as Count Beast reported to his Government at Vienna, and as Sir A. Paget complained to S. Melegari at Rome, justly offended by this cool relegation of England to a secondary rank, refused, in very plain terms, to ad- here to the Note, as proposing impracticable arrangements; and to show that Great Britain intended to have a voice in any final decisions taken about Turkey, sent a most powerful fleet to the Levant, and subsequently, when alarmed Ambassadors began to talk of summoning ships to Constantinople, approved Sir H. Elliot'e quiet threat that the fleet in Besika Bay should appear there too. The Imperial Powers, as we all know, though not from these despatches, recoiled at the pos- sibility of a maritime war ; the presentation of the Note was first delayed and then abandoned; and it became thenceforward a matter of the first importance to discover the policy which Great Britain really sought. That policy has not yet been revealed, perhaps does not exist, but she certainly has placed her veto upon one,—that of securing autonomy for the Christ- ian provinces by diplomatic pressure. This policy was pressed upon her by Russia, but repudiated by Austria, Russia's cordial ally ; while Germany, the cordial friend of both, from the rejection of the Note receded out of the affair. There is no trace in these papers of her wishes, or objects, or determina- tions, and England, Russia, Austria, and Turkey occupy the field to themselves, Prince Bismarck obviously reserving him- self to strike in with effect. The Austrian Government was clearly opposed to any concession of autonomy to any province. Count Andrassy did not, of course, assign his real reason, which was the attractive force a free Bosnia would exert on Dalmatia ; but the reasons he did assign, as sum- marised by Lord Derby in a despatch to Sir A. Buchanan at Vienna, are sufficiently stringent, and cover the whole Turkish Peninsula north of the Balkan :— "Whoever might be the Chief chosen to direct the new State, be would find himself in face of difficulties which might well be called in- surmountable. If his dominions were to be restricted to Bosnia and the Herzegovina, it is difficult to imagine that a semi-independent Prince, called upon to govern 600,000 Mussulmans and about the same number of Christiana of both rites, should be able to acquit himself of the task. to the satisfaction of both parties. He would be compelled to rely on the support either of the former or the latter, and would infallibly lose on one side what he gained on the other. If, on the other hand, it were proposed to extend the power of the Prince of Servia or of Montenegro over Bosnia, he would have no choice ; he would be compelled to sacri- fice the Mahommedans, on penalty of seeing his former subjects revolt against his authority. As to the idea of confiding the Government of Bosnia to a hereditary and quasi-independent Pasha like the Khedive of Egypt, there was no reason to expect that such a measure, if put in practice, would improve in any way the condition of the Rayahs. Who- ever knows anything of the internal condition of Bosnia and the Herze- govina would admit that, in consequence of the extent to which the popula- tion is divided by religious animosities, these countries are less adapted than most others for a position of autonomy such as is possessed by the two vassal States of the Porte. On the other hand, while the conditions necessary for such a position are entirely wanting in these two pro- vinces, the Ottoman Empire contains other countries where they exist. Bulgaria is an instance, inhabited almost exclusively by a Christian population peaceable devoted to agriculture, and whose perseverance has already succeeded in procuring the establishment of a National Church. Supposing Bosnia, therefore, to be granted an autonomous Government, not only will this measure be powerless to remedy the evils which exist there, but the fact that it has been yielded to a mere display of force will seem to give to other countries a right to demand a similar concession. To grant a position of independence and autonomy, therefore, to Bosnia and the Herzegovina, would be an act of moral compulsion on the Bulgarians to imitate the action which had procured such results for the neighbouring provinces. Such an example would certainly act as a stimulus to the whole of the East. It is more than probable that Roumania would have no alternative but to demand com- plete independence. Would the Princes of Servia and Montenegro be able to maintain their authority over their subjects, if they did not set About obtaining for them an equal position ? It is doubtful whether in Greece even any Government would be strong enough to restrain the nation from joining in the conflict, when experience had shown that efforts so feeble had been attended with such success."
Lord Derby, it is evident, approved these propositions, for on June 28, 1876, he informs Lord A. Loftus, Ambassador at St Petersburg, that he had used Austria as an argument in answer to Count Schouvaloff, who, on behalf of the Russian Govern- ment, had asked him to explain himself more clearly, and had pressed upon him the policy of granting autonomy to the provinces in insurrection :— "I informed Count Schouvaloff of the objection whieh I understood to be entertained by the Austrian Government to any such proposal, and of the reasons on which they were based. I added that, so far as the interests of European policy were concerned, I should see no ob- jection to a change which would give to Bosnia and Herzegovina a large measure of real freedom, but that I doubted whether any con- cession of the kind would satisfy the insurgents now in arms. I was not prepared to put forward a plan for the government of these pro- vinces without at least knowing what the opinion of the Porte would be in regard to it. I could not but feel that the difference of religion and the natural animosities existing between the two sections of the. population placed a serious obstacle in the way of the working of free institutions ; and finally, I pointed out to him the extreme inconvenience which might arise from the use of vague and general terms, such as that of 'local autonomy,' which each party, using them in conversation, was apt to construe in a different sense, and which, therefore, led to mutual misunderstandings, when details came to be discussed. On the other band, I was certainly not prepared to draw up a constitution in detail for the Turkish provinces, and on the whole, therefore, I thought it premature to say more than that her Majesty's Government would gladly concur in any practicable proposal for the amelioration of the local government of these provinces."
And only next day he definitively and in writing refuses to press the Porte to make any concessions to Servia, declaring the action of that Power to be so hostile that concession would imply weakness, though he was willing to bribe Prince Nikita to betray the Christians by granting him a port, a concession which Sir Henry Elliot had strongly advised, not because it would benefit Montenegro, but because it would make the Prince responsible for the conduct of people who even now obey his orders. It was this effort of Lord Derby and Count Andrassy to bribe the Prince which created the impression, so carefully spread abroad by fictitious telegrams, that the Prince had agreed, for a consideration, to desert the Christian cause. He had not agreed, but the bulletin-makers fancied that with England, Austria, and Turkey all ready to pay him for treachery, honesty could not be expected of a Prince. Lord Derby, in fact, declined altogether to assist the Christians in negotiation, and refused to consent to the autonomy of the provinces as a solution to the Eastern Question, except in one single contingency. If Servia beat the Sultan in battle, he would allow that Sonia had won the position of Roumania. Here are his own words, in a letter of June 14, to Lord A. Loftus "I said to Count Schouvaloff in reply, that supposing the negotia- tions now in progress between the Porte and the insurgents to end in a pacification, it was obvious that the object we desired would be effected without our interference, and nothing more need be said or done in the matter. Supposing them to fail—which, I did not conceal from him, I thought to be the more probable alternative—I doubted the possibility of effective interposition, unless we were prepared (which her Majesty's Government were not) to use compulsion as against one or other party in the quarrel. The insurgents appeared to be fighting, not for adminis- trative reforms, but for independence or autonomy in some form ; the Porte, on the other hand, was willing to grant reforms more or less ex- tensive, but would certainly not concede autonomy unless compelled : the differenoes between the views of the two parties seemed irrecon- cilable, and I did not believe that either would be willing to give way. Nothing, I thought, remained except to allow the renewal of the struggle, until success should have declared itself more or less de- cisively on one side or the other ; if the Sultan found that his troops could make no head against the insurgents, and that the latter con- tinued to hold their ground, he might and probably would be willing to yield to the pressure of necessity. In that ease, the revolted provinces would have acquired for themselves a position similar to that of Servia or Roumania. If, again, the Sultan succeeded in even partially re- establishing his authority, the demands of the insurgents would be moderated, their confidence would have received a check, and they would acquiesce in some such arrangement as that made with the Cretans after the war of 1866-67. In either event, the time would not be distant when the Powers might usefully and successfully mediate, but that time did not appear to me to have arrived as yet."
We cannot imagine how words can be plainer ; and it must be remembered that they are uttered by a man who rejected the Berlin Note, which would have secured guaranteed liberties for the Christians ; who, with the Cretan declaration that their "organic statute" is not acted on, still presses the Cretan arrangement as the best one for the insurgents; and who does not even express approval of Sir Henry Elliot's very strong and very remarkable despatch of June 8, announcing that he had spared no exertion to convince the Turkish Ministers that they must admit the Christians to the military schools and the army, ex- ertions which, if successful, would effectually break the roots of the Mahommedan power. Throughout, not only in the de- spatches we have quoted, but in a hundred little touches in other letters, Lord Derby shows himself hostile to the Christians, incredulous as to their wrongs—which he says are disproved by the quiescence of the Catholics, though the Papacy is pro-Turk —and disposed to consider the revolt as the result of Servian ambition, Montenegrin want of a port, and Russian intrigue. Of course, if the Sultan will govern better, he will be very pleased, because that will make the defence of the Sultan much easier; but in any case, though the Turk ought to appoint better agents, and see his liberal promises better carried out, and generally to approach nearer to the European notion of an endurable ruler, he is to continue governing. Throughout there is not one word of sympathy for men the lightest of whose wrongs would have driven any Stanley that ever lived into armed rebellion, not one trace of an idea that it would be well for the world and Europe if they could be finally free of their oppressors. Lord Derby holds towards the Christians in European Turkey the position which his father held towards the Italians and ocean steamers,—an attitude of disbelief, prompted by inner distaste for the innovation. Let us hope that his judgment will prove equally erroneous.
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