THE ABUSE AND - USE OF THE CRIMEA.
1 Adam Street, Adelphi, 7th October 1854. Sin—History, or tradition, tells us that the old Romans sold by auction at its full value the ground on which their victorious enemy was encamped. Valiant as the old Romans, with a higher moral cause, and immeasurably su-
perior to them in skill and knowledge, the Allies may fairly calculate to what uses they shall turn the Crimea even before their beaten enemy be driven out of Sebastopol. This contest has been from the first one of chivalric resistance to despotic oppression, with professed abnegation of all territorial aggrandizement on the part of France and England ; but there has been no understanding that an enforced peace was to leave Russia in the possession of any territories against the will of their inhabitants, still less that she should be left with the power again to trouble the civilized world. The business of that civilized world is now to hedge her in with a wall of volun- tary foes, and leave her to fight out her own redemption within her own boundaries till her serfs shall become freemen.
The Crimea is won by the strong hand, with the rifle, cannon, and bayonet—won from the barbarian Russians who took it from the barbaric Tartars. Walter Savage Landor thinks those Tartars ought to have it back again. Quite right, if they would pay the cost of salvage and make out a case of progressive institutions for the benefit of humanity. If not, it were bet- ter to give it to the Turks ; but that there are still better uses for it, to which uses France and England,—at this present time, together with the United States, the practical representatives of humanity and progress,—have an undoubted right to apply it, in furtherance of other things which have yet to come, and to which. Russian downfall is but the prelude.
No one can doubt that the Prussian Government is the ally of Russian despotism, without the courage to avow it ; and we may probably thank Po- land and Hungary and Italy that Austria is not now fighting by the side of Russia, instead of occupying the Danubian Provinces in an armed neutrality. The Austrian principles of government are akin to those of Russia. What has Nicholas done to his Russian serfs that Austria has not done in Italy and Hungary ? The interests of the rulers are identical, as was shown by the aid Russia gave against Hungary ; and though now Austria may desire the despotism of Nicholas to be humbled, as dreading his present anger, the Kaiser would much deprecate his being set aside and a constitutional monarchy or a republic raised up in his stead. For Austria knows well that, Russia being down, she must obey the dictates of France and England in the cause of humanity, and that neither Austrian nor Neapolitan cruelty will be much longer tolerated. It can hardly be that, Russia being down, Austria, even backed by Prussia, will resist the will of the Allies, when a French army on the Rhine would appear as liberators, to give the signal for a revolt which would not fail again, and an English fleet, from Genoa to Venice, would give every seaport town into the hands of Young Italy in a fortnight. The Crimea is an all but island, belonging to those who have the com- mand of the Black Sea ; and Russia held it for the purpose of oppressing all those dwelling on the Black Sea's borders, keeping down and loweiing the standard of humanity by brutalizing processes. This was its abuse. Who are the owners of the soil of the Crimea ? If they be Russian subjects, the Allies may claim of them either to forego their allegiance to the Czar or to quit the country ; in which case, the Allies, who have won it, may establish what form of government they please, and sell the land to help to reimburse their expenditure, giving a guarantee to the purchasers, with right of way up the Rhine and down the Danube. It would sound well at Garraway's, and on the French Bourse, " the Encumbered Estates Bill of the Crimea" ; and pleasant residences in the sunny South, within five days' journey by rail to the near vicinity of the Caucasus, would fetch:long prices at the English ham- mer, with the understanding that the British pennant was always to be seen in the offing as a material guarantee, and the trenches at Perecop lined with Turks or Circassians, or whatever other Russian-bating tribes might take suit and service under English and French officers in the free state of the Crimea.
That is the direction in which the interests of humanitypoint,—a new Ranee Town, a Hamburg of the Black Sea, with the land divided amongst so many owners with a good title from the Allies, that the haute noblesse shall never again hope to claim the rights of serfage ; a congeries of free ports, in which the manufactured goods of Europe and of America may be piled to supply the Asiatic tribes, and generate amongst them habits of trade and civilization ; free ports that will carry off commerce from despotic Rus- sia by the silent operations of individual interests ; free porta in which will congregate all the energetic people of the East seeking peaceful trade, where Greeks may be out of the way of Turks, where Russians in advance of their time may seek a safe refuge from Siberia, where exiled Italians may be- come merchant princes, and where the granaries of Europe may be erected ; above all, where a normal school of national progress may grow up be- fore the eyes of the barbarous tribes coming thither to traffic. If the pre- sent government of Russia is to continue, though beaten and driven to a mock peace, the same processes will commence anew : our real business is to revolutionize her ; to set the people on the government; to crush the monstrous abortion into fragments, to destroy it as a despotic natibn, and rebuild it in some better form. Nothing could be more effectual for this than making the Crimea a free state, where industrial energy might have free scope to gather together a population as busy as that of San Francisco, and possibly of better materials in its staple workmen,—a popu- lation ever on the increase by European immigration, and planting offshoots in the neighbouring lands, draining marshes, and opening up roads, till the East shall cease to be uncivilized. . With a free water communication from England to the Black Sea in a few days, why should our results be less than those of the Americans with their long land and water transit to the shores of the Pacific ? A peninsula of about one-sixth the area of England and Wales, producing cereals, fruits, and cattle in abundance, and with excellent harbours, and surrounded on all sides by up-growing nations, and with its independence guaranteed, cannot be other than a great centre of the world's commerce. This would be the use of the Crimea.
Meanwhile, by what process of military logic is it held lawful for Russian troops and Russian rulers to exercise the monstrous cruelty of burning out and reducing to poverty the peaceable inhabitants of a country they are driven from and can no longer hold ? This is a process only of savage Indians and brutal buccaniers. No purpose is to be answered by it but the gratification of miserable spite. We can understand how a valiant people driven to despair may make a grand sacrifice of themselves and their homes. We can understand why the people of Moscow should burn their city to stop the progress of Napoleon—if indeed the people did it. But that the poor Tartars of the Crimea, owing none but forced allegiance to the Czar, should be reduced to poverty to gratify mere malice, is a thing that all humanity cries out against, as a motive fit only for the Devil.- Even in war, to pro- long useless resistance is held a crime 'forbidding quarter. Why, then, should not the Allies, who have prohibited privateering on the ocean, prohibit also this barbarous Russian system of savage murder and destruction ? Let the Allies proclaim such deeds land piracy, and hang the perpetrators with- out mercy when caught, 'from the soldier up to the Czar. The Russians, like other people, would then adopt the principles of civilized warfare, and cease to molest the unoffending. It is to be hoped that, some day, the world will possess an international court of justice to try such huge offenders as the Czar and his creatures, and condemn them to the punishment from which lesser offenders have every day a diminishing chance of escape. To be roasted out of his palace and left to freeze in the Neva, were but simple re- tribution.
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