MR. GLADSTONE'S SPEECH. T HE great event of the Debate is,
no doubt, Mr. Gladstone's speech. Whatever Mr. Gladstone does and says, there appears to be a party in this country which always finds in his appearances fresh ground of offence. If he tones down his real convictions, as he did during the debate on the Vote of Credit, and proposes a compromise which the Government might accept, if they chose, he is rated, as he was on that occasion by Lord Cranbrook, then Mr. Gathorne Hardy, for not holding to the hostile language of former speeches. If he criticises quite freely, and in the attitude of in- dependence to which his resignation of the Leadership has given him a right, he is solemnly lectured, as the Times lectures him this week, on his want of patriotism, and his unscrupulous effort to lower the dignity of England by unsparing censure of the action of English Ministers. But the truth is that lectures of this kind are but party weapons, after all. The greatest and best thing that a statesman of the first class can do for England is to give his deliberate and mature judgment on British policy in the frankest way,—that way which will best penetrate to the mind and imagination of the people. It is no doubt true that it is one great incon- venience of free government, that the enemies of England are necessarily admitted to the audience of a far sharper and more scathing criticism of British policy from British lips, than any which they are likely to hear from foreign lips. Of course, that is, so far as it goes, inconvenient. That which is intended to help the people to form a true judgment on the policy of their public servants, may and must have at times the effect also of diminishing the legitimate influence of England abroad. But this is a penalty which all free government must pay. And it is a small penalty compared with the penalty of suppressing free criticism, or even of so veiling it as to diminish the weight of its effect on the mind of the constituencies. When the Times writes the nonsense it does about Mr. Glad- stone's duty of not speaking out,—for that is what it means,— it forgets that the most difficult thing in the world is to imbue English public opinion with any true conception of a complicated foreign policy ; that if the constituencies are to choose between two different foreign policies, they must really understand both ; that the subdued and languid criticism which it advocates is not in the least of a kind to make them understand the true issue at all-; and that the real drift, therefore, of such advice as it gives, is to keep public opinion uninformed as to the character of by far the greatest issue which, for the last sixty or seventy years, has been placed before the English people. We say, on the contrary, that the point of view from which Mr. Gladstone is told that he must speak with bated breath and studious reticence, lest he weaken British influence abroad, is a totally false point of view. In the first place, no Opposition statesman's speech ever does.take any great effect abroad, except firough the effect which it takes on the wishes of the people and on the decline of their confidence in the Government. The strength of an English party is measured by the votes it can command, and not by the orators it contains,—else the Govern- ment would indeed be in a miserable condition ; and as a matter of fact, the very bitterest criticism which Mr. Disraeli himself ever poured upon the policy of a Government to which he was opposed, has never left a mark on the counsels of other nations. But even if the effect of Opposition speeches on foreign opinion were much greater than it is, it would not weigh anything worth mention against the positive duty of our statesmen to popularise, so far as they can, by tracing in bright and clear lines, their own mature view of the policy that is pursued by the Administration, and of the other policy that ought to have been so pursued.
So much for the criticism on the duty of reticence. As to the actual purport of Mr. Gladstone's speech, we should say that it had only one defect. It criticised with extraordinary power and terseness the bias shown by the British Plenipo- tentiaries at Berlin ; it showed how we had not only acquiesced in the mulcting of Montenegro of territory fairly conquered, the capitalising of Servia's and Roumania's tribute, the break- ing up of Bulgaria, the disappointing of Greece ; but that if the words of Lord Beaconsfield can be trusted, there was even avowed reluctance in the assent of Great Britain to the final proposition of France as to the rectification of the Greek frontier,—a rectification which, after all, was not imposed on Turkey, like the Austrian occupation of Bosnia, but only recommended to Turkey. So far as we know, this criticism on the conduct of Great Britain to Greece has been sustained by the ultimate course of the debate. Various Government speakers have challenged the authority on which it was alleged that France and Italy supported in the pourparlers much larger annexations to Greece than Great Britain approved, but no one has plainly denied the fact. And Lord Salisbury, who has since had an opportunity of defending at length the conduct of the negotiations by Great Britain, has not used that opportunity to deny the fact. We hold, then, that not only has Mr. Gladstone's brilliant demonstration of the unfriendly, or, to use Lord Beaconsfield's own term, " scurvy " treatment of the emancipated States by Great Britain in the Congress, been sustained, but that his allegations as to the anti-Hellenic bias of the British Plenipotentiaries has been confirmed. It was of little use to insist that Greece should be heard in Congress, if after she had been heard, our Envoys resisted her claims. The claim to Crete in particular was, as we have often said, of the very same kind, and far stronger in degree,-than Austria's claim. to Bosnia. That claim was cer- tainly not vigorously supported by Great Britain. No one could say of it, as Mr. Balfour said of Thessaly and Epirus, that Turkey could as easily have been persuaded to hand Crete over peacefully to Greece, as to hand over the moon. In rela- tion to Crete at least, Great Britain neglected a feasible and most obvious proposal, one beneficial both to the develop- ment of Greece and to the peace of Europe. But the great force of Mr. Gladstone's speech was devoted naturally to the Anglo-Turkish Convention. The passage in which he put the alternative interpretations of that Convention before Parliament,—that it either meant that we were to take Cyprus as the fine inflicted for broken covenants to reform, or that we were to compel those reforms and carry the regener- ation of Asiatic Turkey by English authority and capital,— was one of the most effective in modern oratory ; and no one, after reading it, could doubt that the latter and greater policy is the one to which the Convention really points, if it - be not a mere trick for the acquisition of a convenient station in the Mediterranean. Nor could any one who reads that speech fail to understand the vast and almost impossible scope of that tremendous undertaking,—" the reform of the judica- ture, the police, the finances, the Civil Service of Turkey, and the stoppage of the sources of corruption at Constantinople.' Truly enough, Mr. Gladstone called this enterprise the wildest that was ever forced in "the hothouse" of speculative politics, and the House of Commons felt the truth of the description to the very heart. Even the Conservatives were cowed, as they began to realise, under Mr. Gladstone's teaching, what they had undertaken to do.
The only fault we have to find with this great speech is not its plain-speaking, not its forcible criticism of the part taken by British Plenipotentiaries, still less its seldom equalled denun- ciation of the use of the Prerogative for such a tremendous inno- vation of policy as this, but what seems to us a deficiency in Mr. Gladstone's admissions as to the difficulty of the issue, and the want of any glimpse of a constructive policy in his treatment of it. We hold, what Lord Beaconsfield nominally denies, but by his acts seems to admit, that the Turkish Empire is in liquida- tion. We hold that for some element of that liquidation all the Empires which have possessions in the East must become responsible. We hold that Great Britain must, sooner or later, take up her share of that responsi- bility; and we hold that her share of that responsi- bility should be selected so as to secure more corn- pletely the discharge of the responsibilities which we already have. We do not object in the least to the acquisition of Cyprus, by fair means and on prudent conditions, from Turkey. We believe that the increase of our stations in the Mediterranean is essential to secure our route to India, and especially essential to the security of the Suez Canal against any foreign meddling. We should have been glad to see England burdened with the care of Egypt, if it could have been effected without the enmity of France. That is just the section of the East which we could secure almost as completely as we can India against foreign interference, while there is no doubt in the world that a direct British administration of Egypt would bring the greatest possible blessing to the un- happy Egyptian people. If that is impossible, through the jealousy of France it is none the less necessary for us to prevent any other foreign influence gaining preponderance in Egypt; and for this purpose Cyprus is a wise acquisition, had the conditions of its acquisition been reasonable, or even sane. Hence, we regret to see our greatest Liberal statesmen limiting themselves en- tirely to destructive criticism of what has been done, and sug- gesting nothing but "retrocession " from the contract, as the remedy. One way or the other, we hold that the time has come, or is coming, for the euthanasia of Turkish rule. What is wanted of Great Britain is to contribute her share towards that euthanasia, without accepting responsibilities so far beyond any she can discharge, so as to make despair and unreal pro- fessions the natural recourse of our Government. To that great problem Mr. Gladstone has made no contribution. He has torn the policy of the Government to pieces, but he has not told us what he would substitute,—and after all, something must be substituted,—in its place.
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