THE SECOND BERLIN CONFERENCE.
IT is by no means impossible that Europe may reach the crucial point of the Eastern Question more rapidly than is generally supposed. That point is not exactly the accord of the Powers. In spite of Lord Salisbury's fears, a general agree- ment as to the advisability of certain definite and considerable measures may not, with Lord Granville in earnest and M. de Freycinet vehement, be at all beyond attainment. None of the Powers have any sincere interest in the maintenance of Ottoman rule. Both to Russia and Austria that rule is in many ways a source of embarrassment, owing to the passionate loathing it excites among their Slav subjects. England and France have, as regards the European territories of the Sultan, openly pro- nounced against it. Italy, though with certain reserves about Albania in her own interest, is prepared to accompany England and France, and it is not clear that Germany will do more than stand aloof. Prince Bismarck is believed to wish that the Hapsburgs should advance southwards, and shift the centre of gravity of the Austrian Empire to Pesth, but the Sultan's authority does not greatly help towards the realisa- tion of that project. Rather it impedes it, because Turkey will resist Austria as much as any other Power, and Turkish resistance to any plan always involves the fate of territories larger than those in dispute. There will, therefore, we imagine, be no great reluctance to award Greece all the territory she clai ms as there is none to press the Porte to fulfil its engagements towards both Montenegro and Armenia. The Greek question comes first, and if a demi-official statement may be trusted, the second Conference at Berlin on the new boundaries to be assigned to Greece will end in an award giving her all, or nearly all, she claims, including Jannina, which is, by the nature of its population and the circumstances of its civilisa- tion, her northern capital. This is evidently the conviction of diplomatists, of the King of the Hellenes—who is travelling from Court to Court advocating his own cause, and who prc- duces an unexpectedly favourable impression—and of the Turkish Government. The Governments are in fact agreed before the Conference meets, and will not separate except in presence of some new occurrence, upon which it is useless to speculate or reckon.
The award once passed, however, has to be executed, and it is at this point, and not during the discussion, that the strain will commence. The Turks, though affecting a tone of conciliation, say openly that they will not accept the decision of Europe as a mandate. They will not be represented in Conference, they do not regard "the Powers" as invested with any judicial authority, and they will receive the award as only another effort at mediation between them- selves and Greece. In other words, they will continue to occupy the disputed territory, and will recommence the negotiations, which have been hitherto so sterile and weary, and which in their hands may be and would be protracted for generations. It is impossible for the Powers to permit themselves to be made ridiculous in this manner, for if they do, some future decree, intended to prevent imminent war, will equally be disregarded. They must make their decision executive, and it is at this point that they appear to fall back or to postpone decision. The English and French Governments have not as yet announced
any clear resolve, while the organs of the German and Austrian Governments keep repeating, with a certain anxiety, that no provision for the execution of the award will be discussed in Conference. That body will decide what territories are to be handed over, but will make no provision whatever for such handing. That would not matter if Greece were ready to execute the award for herself, to occupy Jannina, and, as mandatory of Europe acting under a Treaty, to bid the Porte defiance ; but, then, is she ready ? That she is willing, we may agree, but it is useless to blink the fact that she is as yet a weak State, with no finance and a very small army ; that she might not be able to defeat even the Turks in the open field, and that she certainly could not defeat both Turks and Albanians without a dangerous and probably protracted border war. She must, if she is to act effectively, receive aid from some quarter, and the suggestion is that she will not receive . it from united Europe. If she does, of course milt range. If the Powers now sitting in Conference are willing to inform the Sultan that their award is imperative, that the Turkish troops must be instantly withdrawn from the ceded districts, and that if not withdrawn Constantinople will be visited by a combined Fleet, all resistance will of course be at an end. There is no power in Constantinople to defy coalesced Europe once in earnest, and the Sultan's throne would probably disappear before the threat had become well known to all his empire. But the suggestion is that this course involves changes which the Powers are not prepared to face, and will not, under any circumstances as yet probable, be pursued ; and some milder method must therefore be discovered, which will leave the general Eastern Question unaffected, yet carry out effectively the decision of the Conference. It seems to us that there is only one such course, namely, that Great Britain, France, and Italy, the Powers sincerely interested for Greece, should request her to occupy the assigned territories, and aid her in so doing. 5,000 men even from each country, supported by the Greek militia and by the population of the ceded territories, would in a few days place Greece in full possession of her frontier and of Jannina, the city round which the struggle really rages. Turkey would scarcely hurry on the final crisis by declaring war on the four Powers, while the Albanians would be powerless against such a force, and have, moreover, the alternative of declaring their own independence, which Europe has no interest in refusing. Civil government the Greeks are strong enough to provide, and that once provided, a future Turkish attack would be a war of invasion, which, as it could not be successful, the Pashas would have little in- terest in commencing. No territory once enfranchised has ever been reassigned to Turkey, which received in the failure of the attempt to reconquer Servia a final warn- ing as to the limits within which Europe will tolerate its action.
The objection to this decided course of action, which is inevitable if Europe is to retain peaceful control of the Eastern Question, will arise in this country from two parties,—the very weak one which favours Turkey for its own sake, and the much larger one which retains an antipathy, half-latent, half- avowed, to the cause of Greece. To the former party, the answer is simple. Only the action of Europe can protect the Sultan's Empire from speedy dissolution, and Europe cannot act, if its awards are to be habitually disobeyed. It is in the interest of Turkey, in theory at all events, that it decrees con- cessions ; and if the concessions are not made it must, sooner or later, either coerce Turkey, or allow the dissolution which her friends desire to prevent. The answer to the latter party is that they are in error as to the facts. Greece, no doubt, greatly to her discredit for political sagacity, avoided fighting when in 1877 fighting might have secured her everything, but she avoided it because she was civilised enough to understand and to trust the assurance of England that she should not suffer for her acquiescence. Greece, it is true, has not paid her debt, but it is because she has never received the territory in the hope of which the debt was contracted. She has not organised a Government such as Europe approves, but it is because she is too small and too poor to sustain the needful scientific machinery—the strong police and army, for example —which make northern Italy safe. For the rest, her whole tone and course of political life and her whole aspiration are those of a State only too modern, of a State too devoted to intellectual enlightenment and commerce and the enjoyment of peaceful life. Her army is feeble, but her schools are the best east of
the Adriatic. She is not stern enough in maintaining either order or conscription, but her merchants all over the world rival the Jews in enterprise and success. She has not fought sufficiently to inspire respect, but her tenacity in demanding that all Greeks shall be subjects of Greece, that her old posses- sions on the mainland and her islands shall be restored to her, alarms and irritates all her antagonists. Their charge against her is not that she is dead, but that she is too completely alive ; that she will not rest,—that, as the Times says, there is no security, when she has Epirus and Thessaly, that she will be no more heard of. Certainly there is none, any more than there is security that England will be self-effaced because she swallows a province or two in every decade. Greece has asked for no possession the inhabitants of which would not give her a plebiscite, and in asking for them she shows just that sense of vitality which is needed in any State that is to succeed to any portion of a decaying empire like Turkey. The dislike of Greece is, from the English point of view, utterly unreasonable, and only blinds those who feel it to the facts that of all the States rising in European Turkey, Greece is the least Slavonic, the best inclined to England, having once elected an English Prince to the throne, and the most strictly connected with the maritime, as opposed to the purely military Powers. She is the natural ally of the Western Powers, both in the Adriatic and the .ZEgean, and whatever increases her direct power in- creases also their direct influence. If Greece had but ten millions of inhabitants strongly organised, England and Prance would not be hunting about for an agent to maintain their policy in the East.
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