LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
GREAT BRITAIN AND MACEDONIA.
[To ens EDITOR 07 MB SP7C7•70/3.1 Sru,—I am glad you agree with Dr. Evans (Spectator, Janu- ary 12th) that if our Government will not intervene actively to enforce the Sultan's obligation under the Treaty of Berlin to make life tolerable for the Christians of Macedonia we ought to retire from the Concert and wash our hands of the whole business. Our co-operation with the Concert makes us accomplices of its criminal apathy and tarnishes our name among lovers of humanity and freedom throughout the world. Some members of the Concert do not desire any real reforms in Macedonia. What they want is merely a superficial pallia- tive which will skin, but not heal, the ulcerous sore, until their plans are ripe for redistributing the territory of the Sick Man among themselves ; and we are as a nation particeps criminis, and, indeed, the chief criminal. For it was our Government, as you have reminded your readers, who delivered Macedonia back to bondage after it had been set free, while pledging our honour before Europe to see that the Macedonians suffered no harm by our intervention. Did Mr. Robert Lowe pass the limits of truth when be declared at the time that we "turned the keys of hell" upon the liberated slaves of the Sultan ?
Remember that every proposed amelioration of the condition of the Christians of Turkey which does not go to the root of the matter makes their lot always worse, never better. And no reform goes to the root of the matter, or can be otherwise than simply mischievous, which leaves its execution under the control of the Sultan or any of his Mussulman subjects. And the reason is that any change which alters the immutable law that regulates the relations between Mussulmans and non-Mussulmans is ultra vires of the Sultan. For the supreme authority is not the Sultan, but the Sheikh-Id-Islam, without whose written sanction no political act of the Sultan has the smallest validity. So much is this the case that the Sultan cannot even accept, much less make, a declaration of war against any Power without asking and obtaining the permission of the Sheikh-ul-Islam. Thus when the Czar declared war on the Sultan in 1877 the Sultan was obliged to ask the Sheikh-ul-Islam what answer he was to make, and that official (who is the supreme organ of religion and law in the Ottoman Empire) allowed the Sultan to accept the declara- tion of war, provided that the Sultan "is assured that his State possesses the force necessary to resist the enemy, and that the war may possibly have a result favourable to Islam." This is recorded in one of our Blue-books (" Turkey," No. 26 [1877], p. 7). And when Turkey lay prostrate, Midbat Pasha declared passionately in an article in an English magazine that the Sheikh-ul-Islam would not have allowed the Sultan to accept the declaration of war if the latter bad not told him that he was assured of the support of the British Army and Navy.
It follows, of course, that the Sultan cannot agree to any reform which alters the legal status of his Christian subjects, for that would be apostasy. What people forget is that the Turkish Government is a theocracy of a unique kind. Its basis is not a civil Constitution, but a religious creed which admits of no change. And, in matter of fact, no change has ever been made in the status of Christian subjects. Sultan after Sultan has promised to put his Christian subjects on a footing of equality with the Mussulmans ; but no Sultan has ever done it, for none of
those promises has ever been ratified by the Sheikh-td-Islam, and consequently not one of them has any legal validity. But the same unchangeable sacred law which forbids the Sultan to violate any of its articles without external coercion commands him to yield in face of superior force without fighting, lest damage to Islam should ensue. The question of "British ships bombarding Turkish forts" would not arise. The Sheikh-ul-Islam would order the Sultan to yield without firing a shot, as he did in the case of Thessaly and Dulcigno in 1881 when he learnt that the British Fleet had received orders to proceed to Smyrna. If, therefore, our Government is not prepared to repeat an experiment which has never failed, I hope pressure will be brought to bear upon it to make it abandon an experiment which has never succeeded, and which has invariably made the lot of the Christians much worse. The kt of the Christians in Macedonia is infinitely worse now than it was before the intervention of the Powers. If England will not interfere effectively, let her at least retire from the solemn farce of playing at reforms which must end in cruel mockery if left to the traditional methods of dealing with the Sultan. Why has experience, which is said to "teach fools," failed to teach the wise diplomatists of Europe a grain of common-sense on this question P-I am, Sir, &c., MALCOLM MACOOLL.
[We are glad to give Canon MacColl an opportunity for restating the argument, already developed by him in the letter which appeared in these columns on December 2nd, 1901, that where the Sultan is concerned intervention without coercion always fails. But we cannot reopen our columns to any further discussion of the relations of the Sultan and the Sheikh-ul- Islam, or the interpretation of Islamic law relating to the IChalifate.-En. Spectator.]
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