MR. HARDY AND LORD JOHN MANNERS ON THE WAR. T HE
speeches of Mr. Gathorne Hardy and Lord John Manners on the war will be read by all English politi- cians with anxiety, and by many with a displeasure which is only not dismay because they are well aware that Mr. Hardy and Lord John Manners do not constitute the whole Cabinet, but only a part of it—and of one which, having already, through the Prime Minister, more than once assumed the attitude of menace, has yet afterwards subsided into a very harmless and innocent quiescence. Now it is natural enough that Mr. Hardy and Lord John Manners, being at a distance from their colleagues when they heard of the fall of Plevna, and having to make popular speeches in which it was hardly possible to avoid touching the question of the day, should have allowed their own bias and sympathies to give a certain colour to their language,— which therefore we must not interpret too strictly as the language of the Government. It would have meant much more had it been used after yesterday's Cabinet, than it meant on Tuesday and Wednesday, when it was actually used. But after making all the allowance proper for the circumstances and date of the speeches in question, we must add this that if afterthe Cabinet meeting of yesterday, no Minister of the Crown takes or makes an opportunity to speak in a less defiant and more friendly tone of Russia, there will be grave reason to fear that the Cabinet has more or less modified the policy which found such clear expression the other day in the verbal douche which Lord Derby administered to Lord Stratheden and Campbell and his little men.
For first in these speeches we find the most pointed and exclusive praise of Turkish heroism, the most emphatic in- vective against Russia for declaring war, and the most distinct insinuations that Russian policy is dishonest and dangerous to us. " Everybody will agree," said Mr. Hardy on Tuesday, " that the brave men who have defended Plevna are entitled to the admiration of all men," and on the following day he spoke of Osman Pasha's great heroism. We agree ; but so also everybody should agree that the brave men who have invested Plevna and have lost scores of thousands of men in driving back the hardy Turkish troops into their lines, are entitled to the admiration of all men, and not a word of the kind is dropped by either Mr. Hardy or Lord John Manners. Bravery in battle is characteristic of Turk and Russian alike. But all men ought at least to agree, whether they do or not, that the quite as characteristic cruelty of Osman Pasha to his own wounded, deserves the severest detestation of all men, and that the kindliness of the Russian treatment of the wounded, presents to that cruelty a curious and instructive contrast. It is not, then, quite satisfactory to find both the Ministers in- sisting vehemently on the only quality they could discover to praise in the Turks, and ignoring entirely both that quality and others still more worthy of praise in the Russians.
Then as to the Russian declaration of war. " To draw the sword," said Mr. Hardy in his first speech, " is a fearful re- sponsibility. When you think of what has happened since the war commenced, how many brave soldiers have gone to their account, what distress has been brought into the finances of great countries, and how, more than all, a peaceful population has suffered far beyond anything which has been suffered before, you will have to pass a very severe sentence, when you come to reckon up the tens of thousands of wives, children, and widows who are to be sufferers, The Turks may be bad, but it was possible to make them better without subjecting them to this enormous bloodshed." There is not the least pretence of impartiality about that. No British Minister, we believe, used such language either of France or of Germany in relation to the war of 1870, and yet we do not hesitate to say that a far graver moral responsibility devolved on both the French and German Governments in that case, than devolves on the Russian Government in this. What should we have said if Austria or Prussia had spoken this of Great Britain when she went into the Crimean war ? And then as to the better alternative referred to, if Mr. Hardy knew how to make the Turks better without war, ho kept the secret cares fully to himself. The only means suggested by Europe for that purpose, after twenty years' trial of a last and hopeless experi- ment, was rejected by the Turks with absolute scorn. Evidently this vehement scolding of Russia and apologising for Turkey has not much air of neutrality about it. And neither Mr. Hardy nor Lord John Manners leaves his hearers in much doubt as to his own view that the insurrection in which this war originated was fomented by Russia, and intended to lead to the results to which it has led. There was a great deal, says Mr. Hardy,—meaning, apparently, a substantial cause of provocation,—in the insurrection, and he adds, "how it was stirred up, and whence it came, I leave to historians to determine,"—intimating, of course, that it was stirred up from outside, and was not the natural offspring of Turkish misrule. Lord John Manners goes further still. " What- ever our individual convictions may have been as to the origin of this war, whatever individual suspicions may have been as to its possible object and hope, we did not hesitate when the war broke out to declare the conditions of strict though conditional neutrality on our part, and to that position we adhere."
Again, both Mr. Hardy and Lord John Manners do not hesitate for a moment to use language of somewhat bombastic menace. We lay no stress on Mr. Hardy's twofold use of the word "intervention," because we feel no doubt from the con- text that he was making a mere slip, and saying " interven- tion,"—which implies the use of force,—when he meant mediation,—the mere use of moral influence. But the Minister of War waxes very big in menace, in his Wednesday's speech at Edinburgh, and makes his audience understand perfectly at whom he is speaking. Having said that he was pressing on the organisation of the Army as rapidly as possible, he proceeded :—" But, gentlemen, if it comes to the question of defending British interests, if it comes to the question of standing up for that great fabric the British Empire, which has been reared up by our forefathers through many a struggle and many a trial, then even at the risk of shedding the blood of my countrymen, even at the risk of all we hold dear, our country shall put forward all her strength to prevent that glorious fabric [the British Empire] being detached or impaired It is ours to see that no rude hand of the spoiler touches it ; it is ours to see that no military monarch, however vast his resources, shall be allowed to tear asunder from us, against their will, .any of those dependencies which have their reliance upon us." And Lord John Manners, at Grantham, adds :—" If unfortunately, in spite of all the earnest efforts of her Majesty's Government to keep this country out of war, it should be necessary, in the vindication of Imperial interests and national honour, to unsheathe the sword, then, gentlemen, I am expressing not an individual opinion, but the feelings of a united people, when I say that, once unsheathed in such a cause [namely, any of the guarantees specified by Mr. Cross and Lord Derby as essential to British interests], that sword must never return to its scabbard until en- twined with the laurel of unquestioned victory and the lily of lasting peace." How you are to entwine a sword, before it is returned to its scabbard, with the lily of " lasting peace," Lord John Manners was not good enough to explain, any more than Mr, Hardy was good enough to explain from what it was that he so much feared that "glorious fabric, the British Empire," being " detached." But incoherent as both these Cabinet Ministers got in the higher flights of their mili- tary eloquence, no one can mistake the carefully-emphasised note of menace to Russia by which these sentences are pene- trated. When the Minister of War defies the Emperor of Russia as a " spoiler " to separate England from her depend- encies, and the Postmaster-General says that our sword once drawn, it shall never be returned to the scabbard till it has won " unquestioned victory," the " military monarch" at whom both alike are speaking, will certainly begin 'to ask for explanations, and to make preparations for the contest to which he is defied ; and the nation whose future and resources are thus pledged must make up its mind quickly, and let that mind be pretty plainly known, whether or not it intends to back that defiance, and to accept the draft made on its unlimited resources.
Now this, at least, should occur to every sensible Englishman, —that the victory at Plevna is not either implicitly or explicitly an, attack on any British interest whatever, whether specified ars„,a such by Lord Derby and Mr. Cross, or not. It is a perfectly' natural end to a struggle at which all the world has been gazing for five months, and whether it had ended in the retreat of the Russians or the surrender of the Turks, is a question a neutral, as such, should ignore. And the next point which will seem pretty clear to a man of ordinary common-sense is that the best way to prevent a great military Power, in the flush of a great success, from attacking one of our " interests,"—real or supposed,—is not to use the language of boastful defiance and menace, but rather that of a firm and business-like resolve. No Englishman would approve of our doing less than we say we will do; but every wise Englishman would ap- prove very heartily of our saying something less about our glorious resolves than those resolves themselves ought to involve, if they are to be carried into effect, We do not admire Mr. Hardy's and Lord John Manners' style,—not only because we approve most heartily, so far as it has been hither- to developed, the whole of the Russian policy and purpose, but also because, even so far as Russian aggrandisement may really endanger our Empire,—and that in certain directions it may do so we have always admitted,—it is not wise, it is not dignified, it is not manly, it is not acting in the kind of spirit which inspires respect,—thus, as Hamlet says, " to unpack the heart with words, and fall a cursing." Let us hope that the Cabinet Council of yesterday will have brought these great Ministers who dispose so bravely of British resources to their soberer senses, and, induced them to speak with more reality and more reti- cence, of the contingency of plunging the United Kingdom into a dangerous and costly war, which, so far as we can see at pre- sent, would be a war to arrest the most beneficent change of which the prospect has been opened out to Europe during tho last three centuries.
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