7 AUGUST 1886, Page 17

BOOKS.

PUBLIC OPINION AND LORD BEACONSFIELD.* IF the title of this work were after the quaint but sensible practice of the seventeenth century, when the title-page really told readers what they were to expect in the book, it would be something like this :—"A History of British Diplomacy during the Last Administration of Lord Beaconsfield, with a Running Commentary of Public Opinion, chiefly gathered from Speeches and Newspaper Articles, and Prefaced by two Essays on the Place of Public Opinion in the British Constitution, and on Public Opinion cn the Eastern Question." The two prefatory essays—for such they are, though dignified with the name of Parts I. and II. of the work—are the most readable, but the least valuable part. What is really valuable is the third, and properly historical part, which occupies most of the first volume, and all the second.

It is a valuable book, of a somewhat uncommon kind. It is an almost exhaustive history, not of England nor of the British Empire, nor even of British diplomacy as it actually was, but of British diplomacy as it was understood by public opinion, during a most eventful period, which we have not yet had time to forget. The running commentary of extracts from speeches and leading articles is almost unreadably full, but is all the more valuable for that. By reason of the general quickening of human intercourse, the formation of public opinion is more rapid and more visible than in former times. Opinion, when formed, becomes more rapidly an executive force ; and the merit of the book before us is that it enables us to see these processes. We do not think the author has aimed at writing a book to be read with ease and pleasure, but rather one to be referred to by students of history and politics. To such a historian as Macaulay, this book will be invaluable ; and we are among those who think that Macaulay's mode of writing history can never be superseded. Its charm, to our mind, consists in the way in which the author not only narrates the events as they occurred, but shows how they impressed the contemporaries who heard of them ; and it must in these modern times be an aim of the political historian to produce this effect of reality and contemporaneousness. We have never Piet with a finer compliment to a historical writer than a remark we once heard in conversation,—that watching the progress of the Italian

Public ()g.iilian and Lord Beaconsfield, 1875-1830. By George Car:lake Thompson, LL.M. London : Macmillan and Co. 1886.

Revolution was like reading Grote's history of the Greek Republics.

Mr. Carslake Thompson, in the work before us, never ceases to hold the balance fairly between parties, and does not obtrude his own opinions and sympathies, though it is obvious enough that they are on the side of what we think common.sense and obvious duty.

Our attitude towards the Christian populations of European Turkey ought to have been exactly similar to our attitude towards the Italians in their revolution. The two cases were very nearly parallel. In the case of Italy, we aimed at doing for its liberation from Austria and from the Papacy, all that we could do short of being drawn into the dangers and disasters of a European war; but we had at the same time to guard against the danger of French—or, rather, Napoleonic —ambition making a tool of Italian discontent, and substituting French for Austrian ascendency. Our policy—the policy of Palmerston—was per- fectly honest and perfectly successful. We did nothing, it is true, to expel the Austrians from Italy ; but it is in all proba- bility due to our influence at the critical time in 1859 and 1860 that the French power in Italy is as extinct as the Austrian. We ought to have done the same in European Turkey. It was at once our duty and our interest to do what we could to liberate the Greek and Slavic populations from Turkish oppression, while opposing Russian encroachment ; and this we could have done in 1876 without difficulty. The course which the Government of Lord Beaconsfield actually took, of grudging suspicion towards Russia and heartless indifference to the wrongs of the Christian populations, was due partly to the unreasonableness of Englishmen when Russia is concerned, but chiefly to the malign influence of Lord Beaconsfield, who shared and stimu- lated that unreasonableness to the utmost. It was as unwise and indefensible as if, during the Italian Revolution, we had permitted jealousy of France to swallow up all other feelings, and make us indifferent to the aspirations of the Italian people.

The storm of indignation which arose in 1876, when the Bul- garian massacres became known, made any alliance with Turkey for the time impossible ; and the right course would at that time have been the popular one,—namely, to enter into an alliance with Russia, in which Austria also would probably have joined, for the purpose of compelling the Turkish Government to grant self-administration to the Christian provinces, with a fixed tribute substituted for unlimited taxation. Against such an alliance the Turks would never have fired a shot ; and all that was gained by the war of 1877 for Bulgaria, and, in a less degree, for the other Christian provinces, would have been gained without the frightful sufferings of that war, without the imminent danger of war between England and Russia which followed on the Russian approach to Constantinople, and with the result of all the Christian populations looking on us, at least as much as on the Russians, as their liberators.

The work before us throws no new light on the atrocities of the Turks in Bulgaria, and we have no wish for that horrible story to be told over again. But it is worth while to notice the reason of the extraordinary impression made on public feeling by those atrocities. They were committed in cold blood. They were not part of the ordinary license of war ; but rank with such crimes as the massacre of Glencoe and the devastation of the Palatinate. If the massacre of' Glencoe had followed on a hardly-fought battle, and if the devastation of the Palatinate had been perpetrated during an ordinary campaign, they would have passed as little more than matters of course, and would be scarcely remembered in history. There is, perhaps inevitably, a strong disposition, though it is much weakened since the seventeenth century, to regard a state of war as an excuse for all cruelties ; but the special horror of those crimes was that the perpetrators were not, even in the most purely legal and tech- nical sense, at war with the sufferers. It was the same with the massacres in Bulgaria. The revolt of the Bulgarians was a very small affair, and had been suppressed before the massacres began ; they were planned and effected in cold blood, for the purpose of striking terror. This is conclusively proved by the evidence of Sir George Campbell, who visited the district shortly afterwards.* In his refusal to enforce what are euphemistically called "reforms" on the Turkish Government, Lord Beaconsfield had not the excuse of believing in the power of the Turkish Empire to reform or defend itself. The purchase by his Goverament of the Suez Canal shares in November, 1875, was a clear announce-

* See "Sir George Compbell on Turkey," Spectator, December 11th, 1876.

ment to the world that he was preparing for the foreseen and

inevitable break-up of the Turkish Empire. It was not, how- ever, the first intimation of his opinion of the Turks. The passage has been often quoted from Mr. Disraeli's Tanered, where the Syrian Emir advises our Queen to transform her Empire into an Oriental one, changing her capital from London to Delhi, and taking possession of Egypt by the way ; but

there is another passage in the same novel which is equally worth quoting. It is this time not the Syrian, but the English- man, Tancred, the heir to a dukedom, who speaks, though the italics are ours :—

" The House of David is worshipped at Rome itself, at every seat of great and growing empire in the world,—at London, at Petersburg, at New York. Asia alone is faithless to the Asian ; but Asia has been overrun by Turks and Tatars. Arabia alone has remained free, and faithful to the Divine tradition. From its bosom we shall go forth and sweep away the mouldering remains of the Tataric system ; and then, when the East has resumed its indigenous intelligence, when angels and prophets again mingle with humanity, the sacred quarter of the globe will recover its primeval and divine supremacy ; it will act upon the modern empires, and the faint-hearted faith of Europe, which is but the shadow of a shade, will become as vigorous es befits men who are in sustained communication with the Creator." —Tancred, Book 6, chapter 4.

We are certain that Mr. Disraeli, in this aspiration to sweep away the mouldering remains of that Turkish Empire by which Asia has been overran, spoke far more sincerely than did Lord Beaconsfield, when he denied that the Turkish Empire had been partitioned by the Treaty of Berlin. That treaty gave to the Czar the fortress of Kars, which he had conquered, and the port of Batoum, which he had not conquered ; permitted the Emperor of Austria to conquer Bosnia ; and gave Cyprus to England. His assertion that the Turkish Empire had not been partitioned probably deceived no one, and himself least of all. Notwith- standing the utter heartlessness of his speeches and actions—or rather, refusal to act—in the case of the Bulgarian massacres, and his blindness in failing to see that our true policy was to support the Christians of European Turkey against both Turkey

and Russia, just as we supported the Italians against both Austria and France, he was too well informed to retain, twenty years after the end of the Crimean War, any belief in the possibility of transforming Turkey into an enlightened European power. He must have known that the formal recog- nition, after the Crimean War, of Turkey as one of the family

of European nations, was the emptiest of compliments ; as would

have been seen, had the Sultan cared to test its sincerity by demanding that the Western rulers should prove their sense of his equality with them, by consenting to the abolition of the Consular jurisdictions, and leaving Europeans in Turkey to the protection of Turkish judges and magistrates.

It is a mistake as to facts to think that the opinion of the impossibility of Turkish independence, and the hopelessness of Turkish reform, were confined to Radical agitators. Lord Stratford de Redcliffe was assuredly neither a Radical nor an

agitator. No Englishman knew more, or perhaps so much, about the subject ; and he wrote in the Times before the Bulgarian massacres, advising,— " A superintendence of mixed organisation internally, and a joint conventional pressure from without These measures, re- duced to a system, would doubtless amount to tutelage; but the

Turkish Empire has long been virtually in that state Stress has been laid in some newspaper articles on that clause in the Treaty of Paris which has an air of binding the Powers to abstain from inter- fering in the internal affairs of Turkey. Bat the engagement is, in truth, limited and conditional. The Christian plenipotentiaries promised only that the communication of the Sultan's reforms should not be held to warrant such interference. But other rights to inter- fere belong to the Powers, especially to those who either sided with the Porte in a moral sense, or spent their money and shed their blood for the Sultan's cause in the Crimean War."—(Vol. I., p. 122, from the Times of January 3rd, 1876.)

Lord Beaconsfield was perfectly well aware of this ; and his plan was not, like that of the promoters of the Crimean War, to defend and " regenerate " Turkey, but on the ruins of the Turkish Empire to found a vast extension of influence and virtual empire for England. When he brought back "peace with honour" from the Berlin Congress, one of the conditions which he had made was the cession of Cyprus to England. But there is every reason to believe that he intended very much more The "separate convention" with Turkey, after giving the British guarantee as against Russia to the Turkish dominions in Asia, has the following paragraph :—

" In return, his Imperial Majesty the Sultan promises to England to introduce necessary reforms, to be agreed upon later by the two Powers, into the Government and for the protection of the Christian and other subjects of the Porte in those territories ; and in order to enable England to make necessary provision for executing her engagement, his Imperial Majesty the Sultan farther consents to assign the island of Cyprus to be occupied and administered by England."—(Vol. I., p. 260, quoted from the Times of January 3rd, 1876.)

The alleged reason for this extraordinary transaction cannot possibly have been the real one. If we had wanted an island in the Eastern Mediterranean as a "place of arms" to help the Sultan in resisting a Russian invasion, we should have sought for some island in the IEgean with a good harbour and near the Dardanelles ; but Cyprus has no good harbour, and is, from its geographical position, of as much use in defending the Armenian frontier against an invasion from Russia, as the Isle of Wight would be in defending England against an invasion from Scot- land. But Cyprus, though far from Armenia and not very near Constantinople, is very near Syria. We have no doubt that Lord Beaconsfield's real motive was revealed by Lord Derby's speech in the House of Lords on July 18th, 1878, from which we extract the following (the italics are ours)

" When I quitted the Cabinet in the last days of March, I did so mainly because it was said it was necessary to secure a naval station in the eastern part of the Mediterranean ; that for that purpose it was necessary to ieize and occupy the island of Cyprus, together with a point upon the Syrian coast, and that was to be done by means of a Syrian expedition sent out from India, with or without the consent of the Sultan ; although undoubtedly part of the arrangement was that fall compensation should be made to the Sultan for any loss he might incur."—(Vol. IL, p. 406.)

Lord Salisbury contradicted this statement, but Lord Derby adhered to it. We think there is no reasonable doubt of its substantial accuracy, and in all probability it points to a pro- ject of Lord Beaconsfield's for the virtual, if not nominal, annexation of Syria and the Euphrates Valley to the British Empire. The Indian Expedition against Syria was given up, in consequence, perhaps, of the war between Russia and Turkey ending sooner than Lord Beaconsfield expected ; and the project of bringing an Indian army into the Mediterranean dwindled into the harmless, and probably useless, display of a Sepoy force at Malta in the summer of 1878. But the attempt to make the weakness of Turkey a means of extending English power was renewed, in the form of the Separate Convention" just quoted, in which Lord Beaconsfield not only gave the British guarantee to the Turkish Empire in Asia, well knowing, as we cannot doubt, that to guarantee an Asiatic State means ultimately to absorb it; but he expressly took power to nter- fere in the internal affairs of Turkey, by exacting the Sultan's promise "to introduce reforms to be agreed upon." Had Lord Beaconsfield's projects succeeded, Asiatic Turkey would have become a second Anglo-Asiatic empire, with the additional danger of being in contact with Russia. The conquest of Persia and Afghanistan would have been only a question of time, and all Asia, would have become British, from the Bosphorus to the Irrawaddy.

Was the success of this project ever possible ? None can tell ; but if the elections of 1880 had given Lord Beaconsfield a new lease of power, and if his life and vigour had been pre- served for some years, he would certainly have endeavored to make our protectorate over Asiatic Turkey a reality. But he has left no successor; the attempt to establish such a pro- tectorate has been abandoned by the tacit consent of both parties ; the only fragment of the plan that ever became any- thing more than a project was the annexation of Cyprus, and the child is probably born who will see Cyprus freely given up to Greece, as the Ionian Isles were in Lord Palmerston's time.

We have to express a hope that in any future edition Mr. Carslake Thompson's most valuable work may be improved by the addition of a detailed chronological table of events. In reading it, we have constantly felt the want of this.