TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE DEBATE ON TURKEY. THE long-postponed debate on the Turkish question, which came off on Monday night, was not an exciting, but it was a most valuable discussion. Nobody made a very brilliant or very memorable speech. The lokomachy was not by any means of the first order. Very few of the chiefs of debate descended into the fray, and these were not intent on killing each other. The second-rate politicians who spoke made only second-rate speeches. Mr. Bruce spoke like a mover of the Address with the Queen's Speech fresh in his memory, stating and approving as much of the Tory policy as he could contrive to understand. Mr. Forsyth, though he broke loose from his leaders and energetically denounced the Turkish Government, defended a policy already past, that of the Berlin Note. Mr. Hanbury reproduced the superficial talk about Turkish qualities popular during the Crimean war. Mr. Holms talked like a shade of Cobden at a spiritualist seance, and thought he had made a point when he had shown that Turkish trade was far less important than our trade with Russia ; and Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice had not the power to utilise his magnificent opportunity, He had to present the amendment which suggests that our policy should be to secure self-government to the Christians, but he left no impression that the right was also the statesmanlike course. Nevertheless, the debate was most valuable, for it compelled the two chiefs of parties to make not only their opinions, but their policy visible to mankind. Mr. Gladstone was, in part of his speech, purely historical, and in part fettered by the restraints of conventional diplomacy ; but no one who reads it carefully, or even steadily, as we trust every politician in England will do, can doubt of the policy which, were he again ruling England, he would advise her Majesty to adopt. He would restore the accord of the Powers, with the object of securing autonomy to the Christian provinces of European Turkey. His whole speech, from first to last, cautious and even timid as it occasionally seemed, was directed with wonderful art towards this single end. His long and able defence of the Crimean war—a defence unexpectedly hearty, and quite unanswerable, except by men who despise history— was designed to show that Russia was not now as formidable as in 1854; that it is no longer our necessity to restrain the vast ambition of the first military Power in the world ; that indeed, in appearing as the enemies of her prote'ge's, the Christ- ian provincials of Turkey, we are simply playing into her hands. We are restoring to her in 1876 that position of Protector of Eastern Christianity which we took from her in 1856. It is in our enmity, not in her own resources, that her power in South-Eastern Europe mainly consists. She is weighted by her expensive and unmanageable conquests in Asia, weighted by her changed relation to the Slavonic Greek Church, weighted by the barrier which semi-independent States like Roumania and Servia have proved to her designs. The first necessity was to clear away this " bugbear " out of the thoughts of the House, and this having been done, Mr. Gladstone proceeded to the main point, our direct relation towards Turkey herself. He contended that united Europe had in the Crimean war conquered the right and incurred the obligation to interfere in the internal affairs of Turkey, for else we should have destroyed the right of Russia to protect the Christians, without creating any new right,—that is, we should have made their position worse at the end of the war than before it, which was morally impossible. The very purpose of the war was to transfer the right of inter- ference from Russia to Europe, this purpose had been secured, and to talk of the independence of Turkey in the ordinary European sense was to misuse words. She had not perfect independence ; she could give occasion for interference, and in the misgovernment of the Christian provinces she had given it. The Porte is "incompetent to administer its Christian pro- vinces on their old footing," and Europe must step in to secure some better arrangement, which arrangement can be no so- called Turkish "reform." "Turks for twenty years have been making promises, but these promises are so much wind—for they have not the solidity of paper—they are so much breath —they issue into the air and mix with other currents. And it is supposed that upon this we are to rely, without reflecting that we have had the same thing over and over and over again. To these promises we have intrusted the happiness of millions, and to these promises the interests and welfare of millions of the people of Turkey have been sacrificed. I contend that to these pro- liaises there must be an end, and if sensible to the obligations of duty or honour, and looking back a quarter of a century ago, to the rights we then acquired, and the obligations we then came under, we ought to insist that there should be some reality in the guarantees given by the Turkish Government. We must make sure, in one way or the other, that this terrible state of things is not to be indefinite." Failing confidence in Turkey— and Mr. Gladstone declares all confidence is gone, not because the Porte is evil, but because it is impotent—to what must Europe look for the performance of its duty ? Clearly to some guarantee secured by its united action. The loss of the European concert—and it must be lost, if Russia is to be menaced because Russians sympathise with Christians in Turkey—is not only fatal to real reform, but must infallibly produce, sooner or later, European convulsion. "Even that concert may not succeed, but everything else must fail." That concert, which has been broken by the action of the Govern- ment, should be restored, and then,— " What is this concert to be for ? I say it must be for measures con- ceived in the spirit and advancing in the direction of self-government. 'Autonomy' is a word which has acquired a technical sense. I will not undertake to say anything definite, either positive or negative, about it ; but this I will say, that the state of the Turkish Empire, the long experience of now ball a century, show us distinctly that it is in this direction, and in this direction only, that relief is to be had. Nothing else, probably, not even the most miserable measure of relief, can be found from any other source. Let the House consider that this is no new case. Consider how the monster structure of the Turkish Empire is dotted all over with instances in which the central Power has been totally unable to discharge the first duties of government, and in which the cure has been found by bringing in, in various forms, popular and local action. There is the case of the Kingdom of Greece, where, mainly in consequence of the errors of the Turks themselves, this action proceeded to the actual establishment of independence. I need not dwell upon this, because I hope it may be possible to stop short of so extreme a result. There is the case of the Lebanon. There you had to deal with a position of extreme difficulty. Yet there the estab- lishment of principles of local administration put an end to the state of things which prevailed some 12 or 15 years ago, and with which the Porte, by the exercise of the central power, had found itself unequal to deal. There is the island of Samos—I believe I am accurate in the name of the island—tranquil, and comparatively flourishing and happy, because it enjoys the privileges of self-government. There is the case of Servia itself, where, by the establishment of full local privileges, great relief was given to the Porte and tranquillity to the East. Nor is it Servia which is now the root of these difficulties—Servia has been compelled to come in in a later stage—but it is sympathies flowing from other quarters, and not Servia, which have caused these troubles. But the ease I quote with the utmost confidence is the case of the Principalities. Of all the results of the Crimean war there is none so satisfactory, and I confess I remember with some envy that France had a larger share than we had in bringing about this result. The Principalities, when disunited, were much more open to intrigue from without. Their union made them a State of respectable dimensions, secured development from within ; and the effect has been, not, perhaps, the establishment of a perfect government, but, at all events, an immense material and moral development there. Above all, in the view of foreign policy, these very countries, which were the door through which Russia found it convenient to advance into Turkey, have now become a firm military barrier against her."
How language can be plainer than this we are at a loss to con- ceive, and it was uttered at the close of a long and exhaustive speech, in which it is not too much to say that every sentence led up directly to the same conclusion. Mr. Gladstone, as the last survivor in Parliament of the Ministers who engaged in the Crimean war, as a politician conscious that his words are acts, and as the first and most trusted Liberal in England, declares that the duty of Europe, while respecting the "integrity of the Ottoman Empire," is to secure for her Christian States a real and guaranteed self-government.
The very first quotation made by the Premier from Mr. Gladstone's speech revealed the depth of the chasm which divides their opinions. Mr. Gladstone had spoken, in the ancient phrase, of the advisability of preserving the "integrity of the Ottoman Empire," meaning, of course, to deprecate any attempts at its partition, or any direct effort for its final extinction ; but Mr. Disraeli, with that cool audacity which distinguishes him in debate, declared that he understood his opponent to agree that "the status quo in Turkey should, if possible, be maintained." He was, of course, corrected, but in that carefully-designed and adroit blunder he had expressed his inner thought. It is the status quo in Turkey, with all its iniquities and oppressions, which Mr. Disraeli is desirous to maintain. "To maintain the statuz quo of Turkey and to deprecate interference in the condition of Turkey, to assist Turkey and its subjects in the course of time to find out the condition which suited both of them best, seemed to us a policy which was desirable." No matter if the status quo implies unutterable oppression, Mr. Disraeli, who, if not a policeman watching Turkey, has absolutely no rights there at all, "depre- cotes interference," and looks quietly on till Turkey and her subjects, the garrotter and his victim, can come without inter- ference to some acceptable modus vivende. He is, indeed, not even passive in his patience, for he intimates most clearly that no bystander, no friend of the victim, no Good Samaritan, is at liberty to intervene, without his doing his best to choke him off the garrotter. "We shall observe a strict neutrality, if a strict neutrality is observed by others." The atrocities of which the Turks are accused are "imaginary atrocities." "He ain't a doin' nothink," says the garrotter's friend. The state- ments that Turkey had injured Servia, or that Servia armed in the cause of humanity, are equally false. "Servia wanted no redress, she wanted provinces, a very different thing." This is the tone of the speech from first to last, the tone of a man who regards Turkey as an injured innocent, who thinks attack on her an unwarrantable effort at spoliation, and who hopes even now to restore the status quo in the Empire,—to restore, that is, the power of the Pashas at Constantinople, where they are protected by the belief in the British Fleet, to let loose Asiatic barbarians in every province of the Empire, to settle Cireassians amid Christian communities in order that they may be ready, whenever need arises, to restore order by depopulation. It is true that Mr. Disraeli ends every speech, this one included, by hoping for changes in the Turkish Government which may allow of progressive improvement. It is true that he now denies that he sent the Fleet to Besika Bay to support Turkey, or that he has any intention of de- fending her against her own weaknesses. It is true that in a burst of proud eloquence, which told and deserved most thoroughly to tell upon the feelings of the House, he declared that that Fleet had been despatched because it was part of the secular policy of Great Britain that the Mediterranean should be a free road. It is true also that Lord Derby, his lieutenant for Foreign Affairs, denied on the same night in the House of Lords that he had ever written a word which could be construed as rejecting the idea of the autonomy of the Christian States as a possible solution of the struggle ; but, nevertheless, no one can read Mr. pisraeli's speech without seeing that he is altogether Mahommedan in feeling, and that while he will yield to circumstances, to force, or even to opinion, his desire is that the Turks should be able to re-establish within their Empire the status quo, under which we have a convulsion every twenty years. The victory of the Turks, the emancipation of the Christians,—those, in broad outline, are the rival policies of the two great parties in the State. It is for the country to choose between them, and to choose soon.
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