TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE ORIENTAL POLICY OF THE GOVERNMENT.
ONE of the most disagreeable of the features of the present crisis is the deficiency of our new Oriental policy on the side of openness and accuracy. It is not perhaps surprising, that when a policy of secrecy is pursued, when a policy indeed of which, as the Prime Minister describes it, secrecy is the absolute essential, is pursued, accuracy in defending it to the public should be found exceedingly difficult. As a matter of fact, the Oriental politician would never think of accuracy, if inaccu- racy were more to his purpose. It would never occur to him that if he thought it essential to his policy to be secret, and he could only be secret by giving out fanciful accounts of what he was doing or refusing to do, there would be any sort of moral objection to giving out such fanciful accounts. Of course, it is very different indeed with our English poli- ticians, even when they do determine on a policy of which secrecy is the key-stone. They would feel degraded by any intentional misstatement, and they certainly can never intend to make any such deliberate misstatement. But the conditions are hard on them. They have determined on a policy which hinges, as they think, on profound secrecy, and if any hint of what they are doing creeps out, the necessity of keeping the public in ignor- ance is a very strong inducement to them, not indeed to use words which they deem precisely false, but words which, while they shall be in some sense true, yet will be construed by the public in a sense different from that in which they were really used. To take a very pardonable instance of such evasion. At the open- ing of the Session,the Government felt it very important to repel, as far as they could, the imputation (which they knew to be perfectly true) that there was a very serious division amongst them. So Lord Beaconsfield declared that the Cabinet had arrived at "a unanimous decision, not a hasty one, but a unanimous decision," in favour of a policy of "conditional neutrality," and declared that they had "never swerved " from that decision, which was true ; while Lord Salisbury went a little further, not indeed in positive statement, but in casting dust in the eyes of the country, and said,—" As to disunion in the Cabinet, I was anxious to know on what ground that charge was brought, and as far as I could see there were only two, —one was that Musurus Pasha had praised the Turkish consti- tution from which I differed, and the other was our old friends the newspapers." Neither Lord Beaconsfield nor Lord Salis- bury said a word that was precisely false, but they did their best, without saying a word that was precisely false, to produce in- credulity as to those dissensions in the Cabinet which they well knew to be of the most serious kind. Now, if that were wrong, it was a pardonable sin, for everybody knows that on questions of this kind, the exact words, and not the vague effect of the words, are the only things to which the speakers are pledged ; but it illustrates the much more serious difficulty of defending a policy of mystery and mystification without giving false impressions to the public, and this, too, on subjects con- cerning which there is no such understanding that the resourc2s of language may be taxed to throw dust into your eyes. Ministers have experienced this difficulty of late in a very serious form, and it has certainly injured their morale. Lord Beaconsfield is, of course, one of the chief offenders. His Oriental imagination, which uses words rather as colours to produce a particular effect on the mind, than as containing specific and defined meaning, is almost incapable of appreciat- ing the value of precision ; and he seldom makes a speech which does not contain serious error. In this respect he is like some controversial women, who, when asked to explain on what statements their accusations are grounded, reply that if they cannot find the exact evidence, yet the whole con- duct and manner of their opponents produced on them the effect they have described,—which is very likely. So Lord Beaconsfield charges Mr. Gladstone with a course of the most acrimonious personalities against himself, without being able to produce one, though he does produce a personality of which some one else was guilty, and wants to impute it to Mr. Gladstone, because Mr. Gladstone did not rebuke it. No doubt Mr. Gladstone's severe and reiterated political criticisms had filled Lord Beaconsfield's own imagination with rancour, and it was this rancour of his own imagination which transformed bitter political criticism into unseemly personal attack. But that is a slight matter, compared with the astounding inaccuracies as to matters of public fact into which this same Oriental imagi- nation, this habit of using words to produce impressions rather than to express thoughts, really leads the Prime Minister. We pointed out more than a year ago how Lord Beaconsfield blun- dered into two utterly incorrect assertions, of a very dogmatic kind, in the House of Lords,—one, an assertion, by way of pal- liating the ignorance of the Government, that at the time the Berlin Memorandum was drawn up, "the Bulgarian massacres had been perpetrated for a fortnight or three weeks," and that nevertheless all the Powers of Europe were in complete ignorance of what had happened. This was altogether a mistake, and a gross one. Next, he declared that the ignor- ance of our Government was due to the unwise economy of Consuls in the disturbed districts, which was due to the conduct of a previous government, which had "cut off all Consular agencies from that part of the Turkish Empire ;" whereas, he had subsequently to admit that he could not point to the abridgment of a single consular agent through whom any of the information which we failed to obtain might have been derived. This year Lord Beaconsfield has been somewhat more careful, and indeed even more reticent, which for him is the only efficient kind of care; but as his secret policy is developed, his care is relaxing. Nothing could be more unfortunate than his gross inaccuracy as to Batoum, a port on the extreme value of which the party newspapers had descanted with one voice, while its destiny was still in doubt, but which Lord Beaconsfield ran down as utterly insignificant, so soon as it was to him sour grapes,—that is, had been abandoned to Russia,—and he wished to depreciate the importance of the victory Russia had gained.. He told the House of Lords that Batoum would "hold three considerable ships, and if it were packed like the London Docks, it might hold six ; but in that case, the danger, if the wind blew from the north, would be immense." Lord Granville on a subsequent night said that he did not know how many ships Batoum would hold, but that he knew how many it had held, namely, " thirteen men-of-war and a transport." To this Lord Beaconsfield replied yesterday week by citing the statement of the Hydrographer of the Admi- ralty, who called Batoum a bay, not a port ; said that only three. ironclads could be so anchored as to swing clear, and that if it had contained thirteen men-of-war and a transport, it must have been by the ships being .placed in rows, and their sterns secured to the shore on the western side of ,the bay, and that even then they would be insecure. Of course, this is a totally different statement from the original one, —and even this was incorrect. Hobart Pasha, the Turkish Admiral, writes to Lord Granville to declare that Batoum is more than a bay,—" a harbour, and a very safe one, as no sea or wind ever endangers the safety of ships moored to the shore." "Thirteen men-of-war of different sizes, of which six were ironclads, and two large modern frigates, were lying moored to the shore on more than one occasion." It is perfectly clear, then, that Lord Beaconsfield, in his eagerness to produce on his hearers' minds the impression that in giving up Batoum to Russia, he was giving up a possession of very little value, drew upon his imagination for the most important part of his facts, of which he could hardly have derived any but the vaguest rudiment from any well-informed source.
But this has always been the way with Lord Beaconsfield. The policy of secrecy has not affected him seriously, but it has affected seriously at least one other member of the Govern- ment. Lord Salisbury attempted on Friday week to defend himself for calling the Globe's summary of the Salisbury- Schouvaloff Agreement, published on May 31st, unauthentic, and unworthy of the confidence of the House of Lords, though in fact, with a single omission, it was a most correct sum- mary of an authentic Agreement. Lord Salisbury asserts that because that summary contained nothing as to the reser- vation of the purpose of England to maintain at the Congress the right of the Sultan to garrison his own frontier in Eastern Roumelia with such troops as he chose,—a point which Lord Salisbury says was "the keystone" of the whole policy of the Government,—the summary was unauthentic, and unworthy of the confidence of the House of Lords • and he likens such a summary to a representation of Hamlet out of which the character of Hamlet should be omitted. Now, this is very Jesuitical arguing indeed. The summary of the agreement was, so far as it went, correct in every particular. It described rightly the division of the Bulgarias ; de- fined the limits to be put on the province afterwards called Eastern Roumelia ; stated that the Turkish troops were to withdraw from the latter province, and not return into it ; declared that England deplores, but would not, in the last resort, oppose the cession of Bessarabia ; that Russia waste cede Bayazid to Turkey ; that Kotour was to go to Persia, that
Russia was to promise not to extend her empire further in Asia ; that Russia would take no further indemnity in territory, and would not interfere with any previous pledge of Turkish revenue. And all this is declared unauthentic, and unworthy of the con- fidence of the House of Lords, solely because the summary did not say that the British Government reserved its right to fight out in Congress the question of the Sultan's military discretion as to the garrisoning of the frontier of East Roumelia ! Why, it is hardly possible to sail nearer the wind than that. Many and many a Jesuit has been held up to scorn in this country for milder distortions of the truth than Lord Salisbury's. No doubt the summary omitted one particular, to which Lord Salisbury chose to assign what we should regard as a factitious importance. Well, then, he should have told the House that it suppressed one condition to which he and his colleagues attached very great importance, but that other- wise it was authentic, and worthy of the confidence of their Lordships' House. Such language as Lord Salisbury's was the language rather of Macchiavelli than of a British statesman.
But the case is even worse with Lord Salisbury's despatch to Lord Odo Russell of the 8th of June, in which he tells lira that "there is no ground for believing that Russia will willingly give way in respect to Batoum, Kars, or Ardahan ; and it is possible that the arguments of England urged in Congress will receive little assistance from other Powers, and will not be able to shake her resolution in this respect. You will not on that account refrain from earnestly pressing upon them and upon Russia the justice of abstaining from annexations which are unconnected with the professed objects of the war, and profoundly distasteful to the popula- tions concerned ; and the expediency, in regard to the future tranquillity of Asia, of forbearing to shake so perilously the position of the Government of Turkey. In the event of the failure in this respect of the efforts of the English Plenipotentiaries, you will be made ac- quainted with the course which the English Govern- ment has decided to pursue." This despatch was written after the Salisbury - Schouvaloff Agreement had been signed, and after Lord Odo Russell had been made aware of its conditions, indeed after Lord Salisbury had de- clared the Globe's summary "unauthentic, and unworthy of the confidence of their Lordships' House." Considering that Lord Odo Russell was already aware of the course the Government meant to pursue, in case of the failure of his arguments,—considering that he knew them to have given a pledge to pursue that course,—there seems to be very little drift in the document at all, if it were not simply written to beguile and mislead the British readers of the published corre- spondence and protocols, into the belief that the Globe's summary of the Salisbury-Schouvaloff Agreement was really " unauthentic, and unworthy of the confidence of their Lord- ships' House."
But the crafty Orientalism of the Government comes out on the broadest scale in what the Government as a whole have done,— in the secret agreements at once with Russia and with Turkey which they have kept outside the cognisance of Congress, while under the most solemn engagements to Europe to deal with the Turkish question by European consent and not by private contract ; in the denunciation of Russia for doing openly, precisely what they were themselves doing and en- couraging her to do, secretly ; and most of all, in the de- liberate and successful attempt to manceuvre the people of England into a new policy of the most momentous kind, without dropping a hint of what was intended, while all the while they were soothing public opinion by re- presenting their policy as more pacific and innocent than the counsels of their opponents. We have got a Government of Oriental principles, which Mr. Newdegate has more reason to fear than if it had been nourished on the Jesuitical principles of St. Alfonso Liguori. After all, Alfonso Liguori was a great and good man : "Vivian Grey," whose wild story really contains the germs of the moral principle of this Government, was a mere cold and selfish intriguer.
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