TOPICS OF THE DAY.
LORD SALISBURY'S OPPORTUNITY.
IORD SALISBURY has a great opportunity. Now is I the time to show that the adhesion of Great Britain to the European Concert is not a mere addition to the force of the Imperial Powers, but enables her to modify their action, and secure in some degree, at least, those interests of Christendom of which it is evident the remaining States of Europe, wrapped as they are in a sus- picious selfishness, never think. Greece has been beaten, and now lies almost hopelessly prostrate at the feet of her barbarian enemy. We have never believed that she could save herself except by fighting in the revolutionary way, —that is, by endeavouring in every pass and from every hill to reduce the number of the invaders, until at last the enterprise proved too costly for their resolution. The Montenegrins have done that for three hundred years, and had the Greeks been of the same temper they might have done it too. We hear everything of the feebleness of Greece, but nothing of Edhem Pasha's embarrassments, of his difficulties in supplying his army, of his lack of suffi- cient transport, of the waste of men which, we are told, he had begun to feel. He has only been fighting for a month, and has not had time to experience either the pressure from disease which falls on an Asiatic army, or the exhaustion of the arsenals, or the still more serious difficulties arising from the character of his absolute master. The Greeks have been unable to protract the war even for a reasonable time, and it was only in its protraction that their chances, poor and remote chances at best, ever consisted. They have proved themselves to be too civilised for their method of warfare in 1820-29, and not civilised enough for such a war as Frederick the Great waged against four Powers at once. Without accepting the charges of cowardice so freely brought by the corre- spondents against the officers, it is safe to say that the Greeks have developed no adequate General, no competent Staff, and very little organising power ; that their Army, the Evzones excepted, was badly disciplined ; that their Landwehr was utterly raw ; and that their Landsturm, so far as it put in an appearance at all, was a source of em- barrassment and not of strength. The Fleet, of which so much was expected, has accomplished nothing; and in short from beginning to end the war has been one melancholy muddle, worse even than those who, like our- selves, expected defeat could have brought themselves to believe. To all the weaknesses of a dynastic organisation such as were revealed when Napoleon "swept Prussia from red Jena's ridge " were added all the weaknesses of a pure democracy, and Greece, loud, even braggart, in her capital, showed herself in the field feeble and incom- petent. States which fight like that must endure the consequences, and Greece has no alternative except to submit, and to reform her organisation, as Prussia did after Jena, until she becomes again capable of military effort. She is not capable now except in one single way, and that way it begins to be clear she will not take.
Nevertheless, Greece ought to be saved if it is possible to save her, not for her own sake, but for the principle she represents. She, and she alone in Europe, dared risk a war in the name and for the interest of Christendom, and she ought, though she has failed, to be protected. So successful is success to-day, so deep is the contempt which any failure not heroic now inspires, that men have already forgotten the circumstances under which Greece so foolishly and rashly, as the event proves, rushed into the field. The Turkish Government, for the fiftieth time in its history, had just perpetrated one of those colossal massacres which live as events even in Asiatic records, and which Europe holds that even in the Far East it has the right not only to condemn but to punish. All Europe was horrified, all Europe menaced, all Europe agreed that, whatever the consequences, this kind of thing must end, and that the Sultan must be compelled, by pressure if possible, but if not by coercion, to accept " reforms " which would for ever forbid a repetition of such scenes. In England the feeling was especially strong. Lord Salisbury poured out at Guildhall a speech which was a. terrible indictment of the Sultan, Mr. Gladstone stigmatised him as an "assassin," throughout Europe the churches rang with denunciations. Greece, which feared a similar massacre in Crete, had every reason to believe that the moral feeling of the civilised world would be behind her in averting it by force, that in tearing the threatened province from the great Pirate Power she she might reckon on European approval, and she staked her existence on the feat. She has failed ; and there is every reason to believe that, because she has failed, Europe will desert her, that the Power but yesterday condemned as a Power hostile to civilisation will be supported in fining her, in seizing her Fleet, in narrowing her borders, in treating her, by the abolition of the capitulations, as a, State whose citizens when they wander into Turkey may justifiably be left to the mercy of Pashas. It is even possible that Thessaly, but yesterday rescued from the Turks, may again be placed under their control, being yielded up as the pledge for the great fine it has been determined to impose on Greece. There is hardly a doubt that unless Lord Salisbury can intervene with effect these conditions, or others like them, will be im posed on Athens. The Turks are already pleading their right to impose them, and everywhere we hear the same cry, that, lamentable as the prospect may be, the victors cannot be expected to retreat without spoil, without " something positive to show that they were not defeated." Even as applied to the great Christian States that argument is false, for Russia was forced to retire in 1878, after all her victories and sacrifices, nearly empty-handed, and as applied to Turkey, it is positively cynical. Turkey has been condemned within the year as a desolating Power hostile to human happiness, by the very States which are now believed to be consent- ing to her aggrandisement. It is loudly asserted that, the war being over, the pressure for " reforms " must re- commence, and the pressure for reforms means just this, that in the judgment of Europe the rulers of Turkey cannot be trusted, even as regards their own subjects, to be ordinarily merciful or just. Yet they are to have more subjects entrusted to them, to be given more money, to have their armour improved by a new fleet, to be made, in fact, stronger for every act which it may enter into their minds to commit.
Such being the circumstances, what can Lord Salisbury do ? That is precisely what we have to see. If he is as influential in the councils of the Concert as we are told that he is, and as, with such a fleet behind him, he ought to be, he will be able to insist that Turkey, like Russia in 1878, shall resign her prey, that the Greek Fleet shall not be given up, that no inch of Thessalian soil shall be restored to Turkey, that Crete shall be made really and not nominally autonomous, and that Turkey shall obtain nothing, except, perhaps, a sum of two millions sterling, to be distributed among her troops, lest they should allege that their blood has purchased nothing. Greece could raise that sum by a preference loan, like the one raised for Egypt, to be secured upon all her revenues, and could not be ruined or greatly humiliated by a penalty which has so many precedents. She could then set her- self in a wiser, though not a better, mood to recover from her wounds, to recommence her usual work, and, above all, to make of her departments effective organisations, instead of the mere pretences which too many of them, have been discovered to be. Let her limit her Army to twenty thousand men, and her Fleet to ten second-class ships ; but let her twenty battalions be as disciplined as Prussians, her ten ships be as ready for battle as the British fleet in the Mediterranean. If Lord Salisbury can secure this, he will have partly justified his policy, and at least have proved that Great Britain has not become, under his guidance, a negligeable quantity in the European system. If, however, he cannot secure it, if his Ambassadors and Ministers can only vote "as the others approve," then let him retire from the Concert, satisfied that in isolation this country will at least be free from complicity in acts which in her conscience she must hold to be detestable. If she dare not single-handed punish Turkey, at least it is not for her to aid in aggrandising the Sultan. If she cannot protect a beaten little Christian Power, beaten to the ground because she dared to try to rescue a Christian province from Mussulman tyranny, she can abstain from helping to plunder that Power, or at least from sanctioning that plunder by agreeing that so it must be. The advocate of Armenia against her destroyer should at least not assist that destroyer in torturing Greece.
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