Questions asked in the House of Commons on Friday week,.
and in the House of Lords last Tuesday, have elicited that the Government, though they regard the Treaty and other arrange- ments of Berlin as superseding practically the treaties of guarantee for Turkey to which, up to that time, England was a party, do not regard those treaties of guarantee as formally abrogated. The Attorney-General in the House of Commons, and the Prime Minister in the House of Lords, each maintained that though no Minister would now regard an appeal to these Treaties as involving any real obliga- tion, the Treaties could not be considered as extinguished, without being formally superseded by the parties to them. On the other hand, Lord Granville affirms that the Treaties ceased to exist from the time when the Turkey to which they applied ceased to exist and, was pared down to a much smaller European Power, under a very different class of engagements. Nor do we see how any other view is pos.- Bible. Clearly, if the old engagements applied to the new Turkey, they would have been renewed in the Treaty of Berlin. You might almost as well contend that the prescription composed to save a limb, should be taken after the limb was amputated, as that the guarantees provided for keeping Turkey from dismemberment,—or, as Lord Beaconsfield. prefers to call it, "consolidation,"—were to survive her actual dismem- berment or consolidation.
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