MR. DISRAELI AND THE FOREIGN CRISIS. N OTHING should be more
unsatisfactory to the country,— though we doubt whether the country cares a jot about the matter,—than its present position in relation to Foreign Affairs. Mr. Disraeli, who is our Prime Minister, has never held the portfolio of foreign affairs, and his rare and eccentric, and not nnfrequently enigmatic speeches on these subjects, as leader of the Tory party in the House of Commons, are just the kind of speeches which should make us feel both amusement and dismay at the notion of trusting him implicitly at a crisis of great importance. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Derby, is indeed in that position for the second time, and he has got a reputation for caution which, so far as regards caution in the way of speech, is not altogether ill-deserved. But with a Sphinx at -the head of the Government, one does not care so much to have a mere embodiment of reticence at the Foreign Office. In a Constitutional country, one does want to know something of the drift of our national action and the tendency of our national engagements, when that action and those engagements may be -of unspeakable importance ; and we confess that we get un- comfortable when we consider that we have a Prime Minister -celebrated chiefly for the inscrutability of his views on the proper policy for England on the Continent, and a Foreign Minister whose prudence has hitherto consisted mainly in a tendency to minimise the significance of his own actions, and like the ostrich, to hide his danger from himself. It is impossible to forget that Lord Derby has signalised his foreign administra- tions chiefly by two great blunders,—the blunder of signing the treaty to secure the neutrality of Luxembourg, which, as he con- fessed to Parliament at once, was not meant to be acted on, was meant for show, and not for use ; and the false start of in- augurating a seemingly bold policy in regard to Egypt; which it was soon apparent that he had no intention of pursuing. With a Minister who harks back directly he has seemed to be on the eve of doing something, as our first reliance, and an -embodied mystery to restrain or incite him as our reserve force of wisdom, it cannot be said that Parliament and the nation are entitled to revel in that mood of profound patience and apathy in which, as far as outward appearance goes, they are now indulging. Indeed, we may fairly say that, so far as all experience teaches, Lord Derby is sure to do Mr. Disraeli's bidding, when once Mr. Disraeli has made up his mind to any course. No Minister pledged himself more deeply than _Lord Derby in 1867 that the Conservative Government would never allow their Conservative Reform Bill to dwindle into a mere proposal of household suffrage for the boroughs, and yet virtually it was to that precisely that the Conservative Reform Bill, with Lord Derby's complete acquiescence, did dwindle before the Session was over. Nor does any one .doubt that, in relation to the Suez Canal, the hand was the hand of Lord Derby, while the voice was the voice of Mr. Disraeli. Doubtless, when the Prime Minister had made the move, he had not the tenacity and the resolution requisite to press it through, but that makes the danger of the situation infinitely worse. In a time of the most critical resolves, to have a Prime Minister who is quite equal to intervening so far -that his Foreign Secretary is persuaded to do things alien to his own mind, but not so far that he is also persuaded to act on the policy he has thus hesitatingly allowed himself to initiate, is about the most dangerous of political situations. Add to this, that that curious Committee of two persons to whose inconstant audacity and constant timidity the foreign policy of -the country is really at this moment implicitly confided, is backed by an overwhelming majority of inconsiderate votes, and we have as a net result, a combination of steady, driving power, with a capacity for misguidance, which seems admirably calculated to produce a miscarriage of policy, and even, if opportunity arise, to lead to a catastrophe. No doubt,—at all events, with such a statesman as Lord Derby at the Foreign Office,—it is the leaning of the Prime Minister's views on foreign policy which must chiefly determine the critical decisions of the Government. Now, what are Mr. Disraeli's views on foreign policy ? You might almost as well ask what are the views of the Grand Llama. Mr. Disraeli has made, from first to last no doubt, a considerable number of speeches, —some of them very jaunty speeches,—on foreign policy. But much the most striking characteristic of these speeches was that they all seemed invented for the special occasion on which they were delivered. He has made a strong speech in favour of the temporal power of the Papacy, but no one would think of twitting him with that speech as representing solid con- viction now. It was made for a single use. He has made speeches against the unity of Italy, on behalf of an Austrianising policy, on behalf of a Gallicising policy, on behalf of a Prussianising policy. He maintained in 1871, after the Franco-German war, that we ought to have intervened on the ground that we were pledged by the Treaty of Vienna to guarantee "the Saxon provinces to Prussia ;" and he thought that we ought to have threatened France that if she did not give way, after the Prussian Government had withdrawn the Hohenzollern candidate for the Spanish Throne, she "must take the consequences,"— namely, we conclude, war with England. But here, again, nobody supposed that Mr. Disraeli was serious. It is, indeed, difficult to find a serious speech of his on foreign policy. His speeches of this kind while in office have been very few, and his Opposition speeches have been so conspicuously " viewy," that no one ever regarded them as anything but good jokes. Even when in office, his suggestions on the subject of foreign policy have not unfrequently been of the same wild and vision- ary character, as, for instance, in the case of the remarkable recipe which he gave us the other day for the effectual con- firmation of our power in India, when he suggested that to confer the Imperial title upon our Sovereigns would be a good security against the danger of Russian aggressions in Asia. Mr. Disraeli's speeches on foreign policy, if collected, would indeed prove little more than skilful literary preparations of bottled moonshine ; and yet it is in the resolves of this tricksy and inscrutable mind that the British people are at this moment reposing their perfect confidence and trust.
But have we any ground for supposing that in reference to this Russo-Turkish question, Mr. Disraeli has more of a definite conviction than he has on any other matter of Con- tinental policy We should be very Bony to say that there is good ground for such a supposition, but it is at least true that twenty-two years ago Mr. Disraeli did make a very elaborate study of the question, and took an unusually definite and even simple and intelligible line of his own, which, for anything we know to the contrary, may still represent, if not his purposes, at least his bias and his inclination. Mr. Disraeli has always had a certain sympathy with the picturesque creeds of Oriental life. He admires spiritual adventurers as such, and thinks them much more daring,—because much more imaginative and much more sensible of the spell which imaginative creeds have for the mass of mankind,—than adventurers of any other type. His leaning to Moham- medanism, and to other daring spiritual preclamations of belief of the same "violent and simple" kind, has been betrayed in many of his novels, but never did it come out more clearly than in a great speech which he made on the eve of the Crimean war in February, 1854. The thesis of that speech was that instead of lecturing Turkey on her decrepitude in one breath, and Russia on her wish to take advantage of it in the next,—instead of scornfully protecting Turkey with one arm and thrusting at her Russian foe with the other,—we ought to have placed implicit confidence in the self-renovating and progressive capacities of Turkey, and defended her as we would an ally in the integrity and independence of whose power we had the amplest confidence. On this theme Mr. Disraeli was quite eloquent. He far outdid even Lord Palmerston in his sanguine prognostic of Turkish resources and Turkish valour and patriotism. As for the other statesmen of the day, he made light of them just so far as they saw any radical and serious deficiency in Turkey. Lord John Russell, he said, was not immaculate ; Lord Clarendon was altogether a feeble halter between two opinions ; but the head and front of our official blundering and blindness was Lord Aberdeen, who had never hesitated to preach the decrepitude of Turkey, and yet proposed to prop up and sustain by our arms a country which he proclaimed incurable, and which he rendered nerve- less by his discouragement and scornful patronage, at the moment when he should have been animating her with new confidence. "I am to examine," he said, "the conduct of a Ministry whose policy is to support the independence and integrity of the Porte ; who, for this great object, have not hesitated to involve the country in war, and who are not justified in their course unless they have confidence in the resources of the country and in the character of the people, and unless they believed that the integrity and independence of Turkey were not mere phrases, but palpable and real facts." He criticised most severely on that occasion "the insolent character of our friendly dictation," and reiterated almost ad nauseam the folly of going to war for Turkey, if we regarded her "independence and integrity as a farce." If, he said, in commenting very severely on some expressions of Mr. Gladstone's, "the independence and in- tegrity of Turkey are different from the independence and integrity of England and Prance, I would advise the House to think twice before they enter into this war." The only result would probably be, to lead, "after a disastrous war, to an ignominious peace." This was on February 21, 1854, and on the actual breaking out of the war five weeks later Mr. Disraeli reiterated his homily, maintaining that the right attitude for us to have assumed to Russia would have been one thus expressed :—" Great changes have occurred in the position of Turkey, in the progressive improvement of Turkey, and in the opinions of the people of this country, with respect to Turkey We look upon Turkey as capable of forming an independent barrier to any aggressive Power." So that in 1854 at least, Mr. Disraeli went far beyond Lord Palmerston in his advocacy of the Turkish cause, and his belief that Turkey was a living and growing member of the family of European nations. Of course he may not hold this now. But Mr. Disraeli's " viewiness " is apt to be very tenacious of any position once taken up. If we fancy for a moment that any one of his eccentric ideas is dead and buried, we are very apt to find it coming to life again at an unexpected crisis, and nothing would surprise us less than to catch Mr. Disraeli still indulging the belief that Turkey needs nothing but faith and stimulus instead of scorn and deprecia- tion. If at least he has changed his mind on this subject, he has never, we believe, told the world so. Yet it now lies in his breast what role Great Britain is to play in the East, and while we all stand wondering by, waiting for his spon- taneous announcements, he may, for anything we know, be brooding on a scheme to revive at this late day a policy infi- nitely more sanguine and vigorous than Lord Palmerston's twenty-two years back; and some fine morning may bewilder and amaze the country with the announcement that he is going to restore the Ottoman Porte in all its primaeval strength to the European family of nations, and to utter the spell which Lord Palmerston tried in vain to discover, which would bid the dry bones live. If that were to be the result,—and unlikely as we hope it is, it is still quite -upon the cards,—we should have no one to thank for our perplexity but our own apathy and passive obedience. Mr. Disraeli is the sort of Prime Minister whose policy we ought to elicit as early and check as often as possible. When Sphinxes take the part of Constitutional advisers, it becomes our duty to explore a little behind the mask of their impenetrable and oracular reticence.
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