THE POSITION OF GREECE.
THE " settlement " said to have been accomplished by the, diplomatists in the Greco-Turkish dispute is a most wretched one. According to a multitude of witnesses, who. can hardly be all wrong, the Ambassadors at Constantinople. have accepted a proposal submitted by the Porte which gives. to Greece Thessaly up to Mount Olympus, and a morsel of Epirus to the south and east, including the Gulf of Arta ; but does not give her Prevesa, which dominates the entrance to. that Gulf, and still less, Epirus itself, or its capital Jannina, a city almost as distinctively Greek as Athens. This com- promise is to be pressed upon Athens with the whole diplo- matic weight of Europe, even England, it is stated, having; most reluctantly agreed to inform the Greek Government that the Concert of Europe is invaluable, that Britain will not act alone, and that if King George goes to war, he has no help to expect outside his own dominion. If this statement is correct—and it can hardly be false, though there may be• sonic additional clause for dismantling Prevesa—diplomacy has made a most injudicious compromise. In the first place, nothing is settled. The Greeks are bound by every moral obligation which can bind a nation to insist on the surrender of Jannina, and until they obtain it will keep the Eastern Question open, will continue to seek alliances, and will be forced by their dread of Austrian advance—Austrian ambition being the real cause of their failure about Epirus—to make new and secret agreements both with the Balkan States and with Russia. The danger to Turkey is not in the least dimin- ished, while the danger of anarchy breaking out in Epirus, of huge massacres by the Turks, who are accumulating Irregulars there, and of a consequent rising of all the Balkan peoples, is positively increased. That is a very poor result of diplomacy ;. and it is an undeniable one, even if the Greek Court should accept the decision of the Ambassadors as final, and abstain from war. It is, however, exceedingly doubtful whether they' will abstain. The Greek statesmen are very shrewd persons, over-shrewd, if anything ; but they are Greeks, that is, men who, if pushed to the wall, will make a very desperate
fight of it. They dread the Revolution with which their people, disappointed, humiliated, and exhausted, will seek to• avenge their betrayal. They may very well argue that if they fight, their position is still tolerable ; that Europe gave them the territory up to latitude 40P, that they cannot be attacked by the great Powers for claiming it, and that Turkey was never weaker. They may know that the Albanians are willing to strike up an alliance on the basis of independence, that the Bulgarians are ready to revolt, that the Macedonians are on the brink of despair, and that war would be followed by an Arab in- surrection, which would cut away the foundations of the Sultan's, power. All has been ready for that insurrection for months. Syria is almost in flames, and the Turks, with all their fighting qualities, cannot wage war in Europe and Asia at the same time. The Greeks have 80,000 men, and plenty of help in officers, Garibaldians, soldiers of fortune, Greeks of Roumania, and Englishmen, and may think it far wiser to face Turkey now, than to run the risk of her breaking her promises after Athens, by giving up the award of the Berlin Conference, has forfeited all her moral hold over Jannina and Epirus. It is a grave, perhaps a desperate risk to run ; but it is a kind of risk from which a nation with a future before it rarely shrinks, and which it is doubly incumbent upon Greece to run, because she makes claims of almost indefinite extent, and because she has never yet shown in a pitched battle her ability to guard the territories conceded to her. Let her army fight as the Roumanians fought., and, victorious or defeated, she will have established her claim to be a nation, and will find allies. The Greeks, who know their own courage and their own resources, may fairly reason thus, may call Epirus and Macedonia to arms, and may fight it out, in the hope of firing the magazine. In that event, diplomacy will once more have made an utter failure.
In either event, it has made a very great one. The first object of diplomacy, if it desired peace, should have been to declare Europe, when assembled in Council, a Tribunal whose award was final, and must be executed by force against any resisting Power. If they had done this, Turkey would have yielded as soon as the Fleet anchored off Constantinople, and the distribution of the dying Empire would thenceforward have been subject to European control. Instead of this, the Ambassadors allowed the Sultan to treat the decision of Europe as a mere suggestion, to offer a line of con- cession not settled at Berlin, and finally, to refuse to cede more than half the awarded territory. He has defied Europe to take Epirus away from him, and even though he has yielded Thessaly, may, on the Macedonian and Armenian questions, which are the next for settlement, refuse to adhere to the agreement of Berlin, which must then either be enforced by arms, or allowed to become meaningless, leaving two burning questions in Asia and Europe still un- settled. It is the very first datum of the Eastern Question that, unless Europe can act together and redistribute European Turkey, the Powers concerned will sooner or later act alone, and that, as their interests are not identical, and their distrust of each other is rooted, the redistribution may involve a long and sanguinary war. There is no hope, in the long-run, of avoiding that calamity, except through a Con- gress like that of Vienna, which shall decide in the name of Europe, redistribute provinces and even kingdoms, and an- nounce from the first that its decisions shall be executive. Yet the very first act of the Ambassadors assembled at Con- stantinople was to admit that although such a Congress had been held, although a subsequent Conference had decided on all details as to the most pressing redistribution, the award of Europe had no binding force whatever, and was merely a counsel offered to the Turkish Government, to be rejected or accepted, at its pleasure.' It is said that the Conference had no moral basis, because Turkey was not present, but the assertion is merely a denial of the whole ground of quarrel. It is because Turkey has no voice that the danger has arisen, There is no Turkey. There is a very brave, very obedient, and very oppressive caste of Asiatics, who hold down by force certain rich provinces of Europe ; but they do not represent Turkey, which in Europe is Christian, enslaved, and ready to acclaim by plebiscite, or through Parliaments, any arrangement whatever which would liberate it from oppression. True Turkey could not be present in Berlin, and the objection is purely one of form, the immense majority of the people of European Turkey notoriously desiring that the Congress should sit, that it should redistribute territory, and that its decisions should be executive. It was a magnificent step forward in the history of Europe to have obtained such a decision, and to have secured for it the adhesion of all Europe and all non-Museul- man " Turks ;" and the Ambassadors, in consenting to regard the Conference Line as even subject to rejection, threw their advantage deliberately away, and with it the best guarantee ever obtained for the peaceful settlement of the Eastern Ques- tion. There may now be a patched-up truce for a few months, though we doubt it, for if Greece sheathes her sword, Turkey will surrender nothing ; but there is no settlement, no guarantee that within a year the Greeks of Epirus and Mace- donia may not find their situation intolerable, or that any Power may not conceive that the time has arrived for it to interfere on behalf of an oppressed nationality. The Eastern Question is, by the present arrangement, merely postponed until affairs in Russia are a little straighter, until France has got over her spasm of trepidation, and until England is once more awake to the fact that the grand obstacle to the settled peace which she desires is the sovereignty in any portion of Europe of the Ottoman clan. Those are changes which may arise even this year.
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