THE CLAIMS OF GREECE.
WE have not been able during the past year to sympathise so heartily with the Greek people as at the beginning of the struggle between Russia and Turkey we had hoped would be the case. They failed in their clear duty in 1877, and we are not quite certain that one operating motive in the failure was not a mean jealousy of the progress of the Bul- garians. If in that year the Greek Kingdom had declared war, arrangement with the Prince of Montenegro, had withdrawn all residents of Greek nationality from Constantinople,, had passed a law of perpetual exile against all Greeks who accepted Turkish service, had summoned all Greek sailors to quit Turkish ships, and had called all Greek islands to arms, the Sultan might have set up his standard in Broussa, and hull the misery which may be expected in Eastern Europe from the Treaty of Berlin might have been averted. The Greeks of the world would have found iron- dads to defend the Piraeus, the Italian Reds would have landed in Albania, and the Turkish soldiers would have been unable to defeat the equally brave but. swifter-moving Klephts. The Greek Ministers, however, though well aware that the crisis of their country's fate was upon them, could not refrain from displaying the permanent defect of their race, —their belief that they can get everything they want without sacrifices, by finesse and management and diplomatic combina- tions. They believed England, they believed France, they believed Russia, they believed Germany, they believed everybody except the historians who long ago showed them that, in order to found kingdoms, courage, though not everything, is indispensable. They were afraid of Hobart Pasha, who could not have gone five miles into the interior, and in their self-confidence in their own acuteness they let the hour slip by, never recollecting that even Cavour, who was at least as clever as they are, begged permission, as his very first move in his great pro- gramme, for Piedmont to take its share in the Crimean war. They spared their money and their men, just when they should have been prodigal of both. This reliance on brain when muscle was wanted produced its natural results, and while every State which fought or suffered received its reward under the Berlin Treaty, Greece, which had neither suffered nor fought, was left to see if its clever diplomatists could make new pro- vinces out of promises to mediate with the Turks.
Nevertheless, though we cannot forget history with the facility of a Tory Ministry, or be blind to the besetting de- fect even of a race like the Greeks, we are heartily glad that the English friends of Hellas have formed a great Committee to urge her claims upon Parliament, and that the French Liberals are sharply spurring both the willing M. Waddington and the re- luctant Lord Beaconsfield to insist upon an extension of her territory. They are, after all, the Greeks, the race to which man owes most, and which is still, of all races in Southern Europe, the one that displays the greatest promise of an intellectual future. If they do not rule the Balkan peninsula, they will at least supply its statesmen and its professors. If they can be secured their provinces—provinces to which their title is better and older than the title of any Power in Europe to its territories—by any exertion, the exertion ought to be made ; and this, even if the national faith of Great Britain had not been pledgd to the work. But it was pledged. In 1877, Lord Derby, then Secretary for Foreign Affairs, obeying either his own dislike for disturbance or his chief s penchant for the Turks, gave the Greek Government, then preparing for war, a distinct and formal pledge that if they would abstain from hostilities, their interests, at the ter- mination of the war, should not be allowed to suffer. That pledge has been cynically and shamelessly broken. In- stead of demanding at the Conference of Berlin that Greece should regain her provinces, if not absolutely, at least by the title under which Austria—which also had not fought— acquired Bosnia and the Herzegovina, the English Plenipoten- tiaries allowed France to raise the Greek question, and per- mitted the peremptory decision which was required to be softened down into an advice to Turkey to rectify the Greek frontier. That advice Turkey, of course, rejected ; nor can we blame her statesmen for anything, beyond the evasive and rather shuffling method of announcing the rejection. They were not obliged to take the advice of a knot of Giaour diplo- matists. If any Power advises us to surrender Gibraltar to Spain, as properly belonging to the Peninsula, we shall snub that Power, and possibly make war upon her ; and it is nonsense to expect Turks to be more fair in politics than Englishmen, or Turkey to surrender her dominions because a State which has not defeated her can govern them better than herself. No State gives up territory within its frontier, except to a conqueror, or under irresistible pressure, and while Greece had conquered nothing the Powers have not applied the necessary irresistible pressure. Turkey had no proof that even one first-class Power was behind Greece, rather had reason to believe that France, though in earnest, would not send a corps d'arme'e to the East ; that Russia feared Greek extension, for reasons connected with the Czar's Patriarchate ; that Germany and England were indifferent or opposed, and that Austria, though not precisely hostile, was jealous of any extension of Greece which might bar or impede her own future road to Salonica. The Turkish Cabinet, there- fore, offered only a minute instalment, about a fourth, of the coveted territory, and when that was rejected, commenced a long negotiation, which never was intended to lead to anything. The French Government, however, which does not believe in the stability of Turkey, and wishes greatly to find in the grateful alliance of Greece a point of foothold in the Eastern Mediterranean, called on the Powers to act, and produced such an impression at Constantinople, where M. Fournier is really dreaded, that Turkey only held out about Janina, the Greek Oxford, a city at least as Greek as Falmouth is English. They would make any compromise, but they would not give up Janina. It was the belief of the French Government that even this obstacle would disappear, if the English would insist, as they were always pretending to do, on the ideas of the Treaty of Berlin ; but at this moment the British Embassy either " thwarted" M. Fournier, or what was the same thing, allowed it to be seen that he represented only the wishes of his own State, which is unwilling to dissipate its force in expeditions. The British Government, that is to say, after bribing Greece to forego action by a promise that for- bearance, at a moment when action would have secured everything, should cost her nothing, not only refused to carry out its promises, but impeded their execution when another Power, less selfish, was willing to see them carried out. That is base,—how base we shall never know, till we know the real reason for running such a risk to the entente cordiale, which Tories, to do them justice, are as desirous as Liberals to maintain with France. Mr. Shaw Lefevre believes that the betrayal of Greece was one of the conditions of that Anglo-Turkish Conven- tion which smoothed the retreat of the British Ministry from Berlin, and of which not one letter, except the partial surrender of Cyprus, either has been or ever will be carried out.
The Greek case would be irrefragable, even if the extension of the Greek Kingdom were contrary to English interests ; but it would be, even on the Tory theory of politics in the East, most favourable to them. Their idea is to render the in- evitable extinction of Turkey, an extinction admitted by the Standard, in an article attributed to Lord Salisbury and evid- ently inspired, as little advantageous to Russia as possible, and no arrangement can be so little desired by Russia as the absorption of the Turco-Greek provinces by Greece. The Czars always fear that Greece will reach Constantinople at last, and the Greeks, though constantly obliged to turn to Russia, for want of other friends, are most reluctant to fall under her influence. The temperaments, aspirations, and civilisations of the two peoples are radically different, and the Greeks, more- over, are inclined to a somewhat jealous and fidgetty inde- pendence. Their real sympathy in Europe is with England, which they understand, in which they make fortunes, and from which, as a maritime Power, they can obtain real help or hurt. They would, had they been permitted, have elevated an English Prince to the Throne; and when that was refused, they chose a Danish Prince, as the one most closely allied to the English Royal Family. If England would but assist them, they would be valuable and permanent allies in Eastern Europe, where, if ever the struggle engages British troops, we shall need every ally procurable. We have hitherto so conducted affairs that every race there distrusts us, and while Turkey accuses us of treachery, Bulgaria hates us for upholding tyrants and jeering at massacres ; while the Greeks see in us the greatest impediment to their enjoyment of the boundaries which all Europe has declared to be indispensable. It would be well, if we could, to break through that chevaux de frise of hatred, even if we were not pledged by the most solemn international pledges. But our contention is that we are so pledged, and that Lord Beaconsfield, in thwarting the claims of Greece, is not merely neglecting the national interest, and endangering the most important of the national alliances, but is also openly and wilfully breaking the national word.
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