CONSTANTINOPLE, THE QUEEN CITY.
ONE of the most curious of the many changes which of late years have passed over political thought, is the alteration in the political value attached to particular morsels of the world's territory. Harbours, especially if very good indeed, have deci- dedly increased in price. Ships have grown bigger and deeper, and sea-borne trade more essential, while the expense of constructing by artificial means safe shelters for the ships and convenient depots for goods has increased, till it daunts nations who think of millions as people a very few years ago thought of thousands of pounds. There is no overplus of first-class harbours now in the world, not by any means too many ports into which the Admiralty would like to send a five or six-thousand-ton steamer, or in which a modern navy could ride at ease, or about which trading persons with geographical instincts would build up great cities. In England Milford Haven is the only perfect harbour, that is, a harbour which would, if conveniently near the great routes, hold ships of any size yet built, and is not too open to a
• dangerous sea ; there is scarcely a perfect one on the Continent ; America boasts only two or three ; we know of only two in Asia, and the remainder of the world offers only four or five. To pds the case in its extreme form, art and nature being estimated together, there are not ten ports in the world in which the Great Eastern could conveniently refit. On the other hand, mountains have decidedly sunk in value. Very few of them are worth anything in a political sense. Most of the lonely mountain fortresses, once so impregnable, are now accessible to long- range artillery, and the advantage of cooping up a few soldiers in a place where nobody can get at them and they can get at nobody has become imperceptible. Mountain ranges have their importance, as they can be defended, and besides, impress the imagination, and they make invasion troublesome,—though Bismarck entered Bohemia unchallenged, —but we cannot recall an isolated hill in Europe for which an invader would be content to give thirty years' purchase as a" natural fortress." He would starve it, or shell it, or leave it alone, and it would never hold a modern army. There is not a hill capital left in the world, not a place on a mountain worth as a means of national defence ten Monsell guns or a little fleet of Mosquito ironclads. Even the great strategical points of the world, for which so much blood has been shed, are losing their hold over the imagination of mankind. Thirty years ago a public man who proposed to Englishmen to give up Gibraltar, " fortress gate of the Mediterranean," would have been ostracized as a fool beyond the range of serious argument ; and even now there are, we suspect, Englishmen who would think such a cession almost a proof of lunacy. It would be difficult, nevertheless, to find an English statesman who valued the Rock at half the price of the sugar duty; and a general officer, with an hereditary claim to be something more than a soldier, has this week openly proposed its exchange for Ceuta, and nobody has pelted him yet, or will pelt him. Ceuta has a future, Gibraltar has not, and we are the people of the future. In Asia, owing to some difficulties about coal, and perhaps to a little of the old leaven which lingers about Anglo-Indian opinion, there is a place or two supposed to have some special value ; but there are cool engineers with military experience who have doubts about the value of Aden, and who do not understand why Lord Palmerston told so many fibs about the lighthouse on Perim. What will all those guns there do? Coaling stations are useful, and bonded warehouses, but beyond those two accidental and as it may be temporary necessi- ties, the political world is not quite convinced that any place not producing revenue, or affording room for man, or offering the advantages of a natural dockyard, can be of any particular political value.
The general change which has passed over opinion makes one particular exception the more remarkable, and we have been asked this week by a friend, somewhat given to belief in the nineteenth century, why the world, which has rejected the worship of high places, and of little islands, and of spots supposed to command straits, should believe so very deeply in the importance of a third-rate city in South-Eastern Europe. Why think so much, or talk so much, or spend so much about Constantinople? What does it matter if Russia acquires the Turkish capital, or anybody else ? The world will be where it was, or rather better than it was, and nations will be strong or weak according to their numbers, their spirit, and their " resources,"—that is, in less vague phrase- ology, their power of obtaining great quantities of the expensive materiel of modern war. It is a sensible question, and one which for many reasons we should be glad to answer by an assertion that Constantinople is of no importance at all to mankind, only that answer unfortunately would be the reverse of the truth. It is very important, so important to certain people under certain circumstances, that its possession, if those people threatened it, and those circumstances occurred, might be worth a good, big, dangerous, costly, bothering fight.
The old, old theory about " the balance of power," which every- body nowadays ridicules, more particularly and more easily if he has not, unlike Mr. Bright, any clear idea of what he is ridi- culing, had, we take it, one sound idea at its basis. It would not do to let any one power found a universal monarchy, or granting that to be unlikely, a monarchy so powerful that every nation which wished to keep its independence, its own ways, its own pre- judices, its own civilization, its own ideal, should be compelled to maintain a restless qui viva, to turn itself into an armed sentry- box or military cantonment. Life in that case would for the remainder of mankind be much more burdensome ; there would be more taxes, a heavier conscription, more drill, less vividness in politics, less variety of development, and generally, we sus- pect, less vigour of intellectual life. At, least the approach to universal monarchy has hitherto produced very few men of the highest brain except for the exact sciences,
and the resistance to it has evolved a great many. Well, there are one or two races who seem to thoughtful persons, reasoning about that as they would about anything else, able if they secured certain geographical positions to assume that attitude to the world at large. We will not quote Louis XIV., or Napoleon, or the ideas of their enemies about them, because of course a man's grand- father is a fool in the eyes of his grandson,—and very properly, else we should always be listening instead of thinking, which would be wearisome, —and we will talk to grandsons only. They will admit that a strong man standing in his own porch is more dangerous to passengers, if he wants to be dangerous, than inside his house. Well, Russia in possession of Constantinople would be in just that position; and so would Germany be, if she were suzerain from Pesth southwards ; or, for that matter, England, if she had a railroad from Scutari to India. The specialty of Constanti- nople, the virtue for which men have fought for it for twelve hundred years, is just this, that any strong man who holds it and the territory immediately north of it can hit anybody he likes without being hit in return. He strikes out at ease, while his adversary bits his knuckles.,against pillars. That does not matter, if he is weak, like the later Greek, or a worn-out barbarian, like the Turk ; but suppose he is at once strong and aggressive. A Romanoff master of Constantinople would have an unassailable depot, or fortress, with a huge dockyard, the Sea of Marmora, on the eastern side, inaccessible to any flag but his own ; a huge close harbour, the Bosphorus, in front ; and a huge fortress, which he would build at very slight expense,—for twenty 100-pounders on Monsell carriages, would shut the entrance against anything but a bird,—upon the west. He could build fleets for ever which nobody would even see, and could strike any place in the Mediter- ranean without a chance of reprisals. If engineers may be trusted, any man in the profession, with European workmen, a couple of millions, and absolute power, could place Constanti- nople beyond the reach of assault, making of it a fortress to which Cronstadt would be a toy,—and a British fleet with a Napier on board did not take Cronstadt. Nobody would be able to get near it, any more than to get near Tobolsk, while its owner could get near anybody, as the Viceroy of Tobolsk cannot do. He would be a long-armed boxer, master at once of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, of the mouths of the Danube, the mouths of the Volga, and the mouths of the Nile ; would control or menace the Northern coast of the Mediterranean, where the present is so great ; threatening Marseilles, and Naples, and Athens, and Trieste all at once ; and of the Southern coast, where the future is so possible. Moreover he would be driven, partly by the prestige of his capital, which would make it the resort of all the discontented in Western Asia, partly by his own natural hunger for beautiful properties easily acquired,—for revenue, in fact,—to conquer Asia Minor and Egypt, which would lie, as it were, at his doors ; and, if he were decently prudent, would ask him to come in. The Fellalis would accept Satan if he rid them of the Pasha and let them have their lands as Russian villagers in the interior have their lands. This would be to seize the fairest -.countries of Asia and the only country in Africa worth having ; to possess regions which wisely governed would yield endless cash, and open routes to any conquest the Czar might, from judg- ment, or ambition, or even caprice, heartily desire. Behind, iu the cold North, would lie myriads of obedient soldiers ; by his side, timid, though jealous enemies ; in front, a rich population, ready to be serfs. The Czar would be an -armed man in a porch ready to rob any passenger weaker than himself, but almost unassailable by the police of the world. He might not wish to assail anybody,—that is a possible theory about nuy politician,—but he would have every temptation to do it, he -could not be hurt if he did, and he would be very much pressed by those around him to try, more pressed than the Indian Viceroy is to annihilate the last vestiges of native independence. He would be surrounded, in fact, by races who need strong order, to whom he could give strong order, and whose conquest would therefore seem an act of mercy. No doubt he could, if too dangerous, be resisted in the end. The rise of America has altered all European conditions, and it is difficult to conceive the power to which the English-speaking peoples, once united in offensive and defensive alliance, could not dictate terms of peace, or rather the ultimate limits of war. But the statesmen of Europe have hitherto held it wiser not to let affairs arrive at so extreme a point of tension, to insist that no power should rise to such a height as to be unassailable, to lay down the proviso that a nation which has natural advantages such as Russia has in her snows and size, and England in her insular position, should not be allowed to conquer other and equal advantages, and thus combine very
many modes of attack with very few necessities for defence. The statesmen may be wrong in their opinions,—we by no means deny it,—but they are not wrong in their facts, namely, that Russia in getting Constantinople would get a hundred opportunities of attack without incurring one extra liability for defence, that Con- stantinople is the natural fortress of the world, the one position in which it might be possible to build-up a power that would compel the remainder of mankind, if they liked independence, to sleep always under arms.
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