MIDHATISM.
THE stars in their courses seem to be fighting against British Jingoism. We all remember its jubilant boast-. jugs and confident predictions down to the catastrophe of the
last General Election. Its chief prophet in the Metropolitan Press assured his readers that Mr. Gladstone's Midlothian speeches had alienated the country and disgusted the "Moderate Liberals." Nor was the bewildered prophet con- vinced by the crushing answer which the "Moderate Liberals" and the country made to his lugubrious warnings. "To- morrow to fresh fields and pastures new." Under a new name and in a fresh habitation he still kept on prophesying woe to the Liberal Party, whether they would hear or whether they would forbear. The concert of Europe was a sham. Dulcigno would never be given up. It was not given up because Mr. Gladstone threatened to seize the revenues of Smyrna, but because Prince Bismarck had laid a deep plot to baffle and humiliate Mr. Gladstone. The Sultan had given up Dulcigno at the request of Germany, in return for Prince Bismarck's assurance that the concert of Europe should go no further, and that no cession of territory should be demanded in Thessaly or Epirus. We have seen the end of those predictions. Dulcigno was given up in consequence of Mr. Gladstone's threat to seize the revenues of Smyrna. The concert of Europe was not broken up, but on the contrary compelled the rectification of the Greek frontier. And Mr. Goschen has lately told us that no Government adhered more loyally than that of Germany to the concert of Europe and the policy of Mr. Gladstone's Government, as conducted by the skilful diplomacy and tenacity of purpose of Lord Granville.
But perhaps the hardest blow of all to Jingoism is the collapse of what we may call " Midhatism." Who does not remember the ecstasy of joy with which Midhat Pasha's elevation to the dignity of Grand Vizier, six years ago, was hailed by the Jingo party! The hour had come at last—and the man. A reformer had appeared upon the scene who was equal at once to the task of defeating Muscovite guile and regenerating the Ottoman Empire. In due time Midhat produced his wonder- ful Constitution, amidst salvoes of artillery. The Conference of Constantinople was checkmated, to the delirious delight of the Jingoes, who fully believed—and with no small justifica- tion—that the British Government would, as in Crimean days, ally herself with the Crescent against the Cross. Public opinion, however, prevented so insane an adventure ; and Midhat, the real author of the Russo-Turkish war, found him- self an exile in London. He is now an exile again, on his way to the interior of Arabia, having narrowly escaped capital punishment for his supposed share in the murder of Sultan Abdul Aziz. It is a cruel dilemma for the Jingoes. If Midhat murdered his Sovereign, as a Turkish Court of Justice has declared, the Jingoes must, however reluctantly, give up their great re- former. If, on the other hand, the Sultan and his Court of Justice have convicted Midhat contrary to evidence and law, what must we think of Mussulman rule and Turkish justice ? If a great Pasha has no chance of justice, what chance
can a despised Christian peasant have ? The Jingoes -are thus in a strait. They must give up Midhat Pasha, the great anti-Muscovite reformer, or they must abjure all the eloquent apologies for Turkish misrule which they have uttered during the last six years. For our own part, being neither partisans of Midhat Pasha nor of Turkish justice, we feel free to express our conviction that Midhat Pasha may have been guilty of the crime laid against him, but that he had not a fair trial. He may have received his deserts, but not in accordance with the strict rules of justice. That Abdul Aziz was murdered appears to us hardly questionable. The examination of the corpse by the doctors was illusory. The Turks have a horror of post-mortem examinations, and would certainly not permit the opening or dissection of the Sultan's body, especially by Ghiaours. Nor did the doctors pretend to have done anything of the kind. The examination of the body was entirely superficial. The opinion of the best informed is that the fatal wound was inflicted by a kind of impalement well known in Oriental countries, and by means of which a vital part may be reached without leaving any outward trace of injury. Suicide, moreover, is an abhorrent idea to Mussulmans, and is a crime almost unknown among them. It disgraces the memory and family of the deceased, and excludes him from Paradise. To account for Sultan Aziz's death by suicide was, therefore, a grave blunder on the part of Midhat Pasha. No intelligent Mussulman believed it. If, on the other hand, the Sultan's death had been attributed to fever or apoplexy, the Turks would have understood quite well what was meant, and no indignity would have been offered to their faith. The truth is, Midhat, in ascribing Sultan Aziz's death to suicide, made just that kind of blunder from which superstition or religious sensitive-
ness would have saved one who was, in fact as well as in name, a True Believer. The trial of Midhat was, doubtless, a farce, as trials in Turkish Courts of Justice always are. But the Sultan made an enormous concession to European opinion in granting to the accused a public trial, and allowing them to employ counsel in their defence. The sentence was, of course, in accordance with the wishes of the Sultan ; but the disposal of the prisoners was a sore dilemma to him. To execute none of them would have outraged the feelings of the friends of Abdul Aziz and the Old Turkish party ; and to exe- cute the instruments and let off the principals would have been resented still more strongly. On the other hand, to execute Midhat and the other Pashas would have shocked an important section of European opinion, and offended the Young Turkish party. To this must be added the Sultan's own wish to accentuate, in a striking manner, the danger of deposing Sultans. He has solved the diffi- culty in the most practical manner by banishing the convicted Pashas to the interior of Arabia, where they will probably die of one of those diseases which always come so conveniently to the aid of an Oriental ruler in a difficulty.
In spite of the halo of romance in which the Jingo Press enveloped the name and career of Midhat Pasha, he is in reality a common-place character ; a vain, ambitious, cruel man, troubled with no sort of scruples, either of religion or morals. His parentage has been a matter of controversy. According to some, he was born in a quarter of Stamboul where his father held the post of Cadi. A writer in the Revue des Deux Mondes makes him a native of Widdin, and con- gratulates him on having thus escaped the corrupting influ- ence of the oligarchy of Effendis in Constantinople. A Hungarian admirer, on the other hand, gives Midhat Poland for a country and a Jewish Rabbi for a father, and thus accounts for his hatred of Christians in general, and Russians in particular. Midhat's own account, which we believe the correct one, is that he was born on a farm (Chiflik) near Nish, and that his father was a Pomak,—that is, a descendant of one of the renegade Bulgarians who apostatised to Islam when the Turks conquered the country. Midhat has been further represented as a modern Herodotus, who early in his career travelled to the sources of modern learning and science—Vienna, Paris, London—to prepare himself for that ride of regenerator of Islam on which, according to his eulo- gists, he had set his heart. Midhat did once travel beyond the boundaries of Islam before his first exile, but his travels took him no farther than Trieste, and they had a much more mundane motive than an ardent thirst for knowledge. The two facts for which Midhat Pasha will be known in history are the Bulgarian Massacres and the Turkish Constitution. He is responsible for the Bulgarian atrocities in a double sense. It was he who cursed Bulgaria with the importation of the Circassians. After the subjugation of the Caucasus by Russia the Circassians left their homes in multitudes, and it became a question how to dispose of them. Some time after the Crimean war Sir Henry Bulwer, then British Ambassador at the Porte, proposed that the Circassians should be sent to colonise some of the uninhabited parts of Asiatic Turkey, and made representations to that effect to the British Government, with the result of obtaining a pro- mise of a grant of, we believe, £4,000,000. The Porte was delighted ; but Midhat Pasha, who was at the time Governor of Bulgaria, had other views. He offered to plant the Circassians in Bulgaria, without expense either to the Porte or the British Government. His offer was accepted, with the consequences with which the world is now familiar. Midhat, in fact, became convinced that it was necessary for the safety of Islam that the Christian subjects of the Porte in Europe should be diminished. He declared on more than one occa- sion that on conquering the country the Turks had made a great mistake in not giving all the population the choice of the Koran or the sword. It was he who organised the Bulgarian massacres, and promoted and decorated the principal per- petrators. Abdul Aziz had a rooted antipathy to Midhat, and for some time resisted his elevation to the Grand Vizierate. When his promotion was pressed upon him on one occasion, he replied, "Let him be rewarded in a suitable manner ; but it is insupportable to me to be in daily converse with a man so utterly repugnant to me." For this repugnance poor Abdul Aziz had to pay dearly. But the great glory of Midhat, in the eyes of the Jingoes, is his Constitution. His Parliament, it is still currently believed, was dissolved af ter the triumph of the Russian arms on the demand of the Russian Government, which feared the contagious influence of Parliamentary institutions in Turkey.
How absurd this legend is will be at once apparent from the fact that Russian Finland possesses a Parliamentary constitution as free as that of England, and that the Russian Government framed a constitution for liberated Bulgaria much more liberal than Midhat's. In truth, Midhat's constitution was a sheer imposture. It curtailed a little the power of the Sultan, and enlarged considerably (which was Midhat's real purpose) the power of the Grand Vizier ; but it left no sort of practical power to the Parliament. It left it the power of speech under certain restrictions, and it was the unexpected exercise of that power, so dangerous to the Turkish Pashas, which sealed the doom of Midhat's Constitution. How very real that danger was may be illustrated by a very suggestive incident, which we give on the authority of one who was pre- sent on the occasion, and with which we may close our obser- vations on Midhatism. Before the publication of Midhat's Constitution, he invited a few of the leading men in Constan- tinople to discuss it at a private party. The Young Turkey members of the party praised the Constitution indiscriminately. Presently Midhat turned to a grave old Turk, who had been listening patiently, but said nothing, and asked him for his opinion. I suppose," replied the old Turk, "that all this is serious ?" "Quite serious," answered Midhat, somewhat tartly. "Then too serious," rejoined the other, "for your Chamber, with its Mussulman majority, or even if it should not have a single Ghiaour, will speedily become the tomb of the Ottoman Empire." The circle closed round the speaker with eager curiosity, mingled with alarm. This was too much for Midhat, who cried out impatiently,—
" Sirkoshrecsen: (' You are drank.')--' No, I am not drank,' was the quiet answer. I speak with the fall exercise of that share of reason which God has given me ; and with the full knowledge that we all have of the venality of our judges, of the greed of our governors, of the barbarity of our zaptielas, and the rapacity of our tax-collectors, in a word, of the corruption of our whole Administration, from the highest to the lowest, from the Danube to the Euphrates. What our people suffer, bear, and endure without murmuring is hardly con- ceivable, and we pay no heed, except when the excess of the evil breaks out in acts of open resistance. Oar Mussulman provinces are generally patient and docile, either from the resignation imposed upon them by religion, or not to create difficulties for the Khalif which would turn to the advantage of his enemies. Besides, foreign intrigues have to the present time been so kind as not to carry on their dissolving action in our Asiatic provinces, where our Mussul- mans, more ancient adherents of the Prophet than ourselves, vegetate in a condition worse than that we have made for our rayahs of Europe. Amongst these last, open revolts have been frequent against the authority of the Sublime Porte. Here the exhortations and the encouragement of the foreigner find more easy access ; but the mutual rivalry of races and of the different sects of Christians has ever pre- vented them raising the standard of revolt at one and the same time amongst the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catbolics,—amongst Greeks and Slays. Thus insurrections have ever been local, and even such local ones only partial. They have, moreover, only broken out at times ; for, before exposing himself to ruin by fire and sword, the Christian peasant must have suffered from more than an ordinary amount of oppression and arbitrary conduct on the part of the agents of authority, and must have some exterior encouragement, in the shape of weapons, ammunition and money, and a promise of help. These elements are not always found at the same time, in the same place ; and when all tends to favour insurrection, our brave Asiatic Mussel- mans fly to our help in the name of Islam, which we point to as threatened. But with delegates from each province united in one circle, the spirit of insurrection will come forth without Russian en. couragement, without arms. Its only weapon will be the Word : let one deputy with common-sense come and tell in the assembly the state of oppression under which his province lives, the iniquities that are committed there with impunity, the arbitrary rule which there flourishes, and the accumulated ruin, and every other deputy will recognise in such a picture the condition of his own province. I ask you how the Sublime Porte and the Bhalifat will be upheld from the day on which our Asiatic Massulmans learn and know that the Ghiaonrs have revolted, not against Islam, as we have made them believe, but against the evils which are the common lot of all the Empire, and particularly of the Mussulman provinces. Let us reflect well before we, with our own hands, create this Chamber, whence will issue the fire which will devour us all.' The listeners grew pale, as he continued,—' It is not that I wish to favour the arbitrary rule which is devouring the country, but I want to show how this project of government by Parliament, which so much pleases the English Ambassador, appears to me, on the contrary, worthy of having been inspired by General Ignatieff.' "
The prophecy of the old Turk was verified. The frank speech of the deputies alarmed the Pashas, and Midhat's Constitution and Parliament were sent to the limbo where all projects of Turkish reforms lie buried.
Previous page
