LORD SALISBURY'S "HISTORIC CONSCIOUSNESS."
LORD SALISBURY'S "historic consciousness" may well compare with Lord Beaconsfield's for accuracy, after the former's Bank-holiday speech on the foreign and colonial policy of the Government ; and it far surpasses Lord
Beaconsfield's in its historic grasp. We observe that a contemporary is puzzled to understand why Lord Salis- bury chose the time of Elizabeth, as the reign in which that old historic policy began which it had been his own good-fortune and credit to reinstate, after the unfortunate but brief break in it caused by the Administration of Mr. Gladstone. The explanation is simple. Mr. Anderson Rose, who proposed Lord Salisbury's health to the Bank-holiday- Beaconsfield's in its historic grasp. We observe that a contemporary is puzzled to understand why Lord Salis- bury chose the time of Elizabeth, as the reign in which that old historic policy began which it had been his own good-fortune and credit to reinstate, after the unfortunate but brief break in it caused by the Administration of Mr. Gladstone. The explanation is simple. Mr. Anderson Rose, who proposed Lord Salisbury's health to the Bank-holiday- makers at Hatfield, had fixed the date, by his reference to the rise of the family of the Cecile. "They were now assern1-1- ',- said this orator, "on a spot which histervb..3 much of, +..) be jubilant. The ancestor —and where they could afford
of their host, that pent Lord Burleigh the Minister of Queen Elizabeth, 11,..1 laid on adamantine rocks the foundation g.eatness, and he believed the Ministry now in
of England's
office would continue to uphold it." It was on this eloquent bizio that Lord Salisbury spoke. He answered at once for continuing to build on the adamantine rooks, that is, for continuing in the reign of Victoria the policy which his great ancestor had inaugurated in . the reign of Elizabeth. You must not, he said, take any individual step of our recent foreign policy, and criticise that apart. No,—" You must rather look upon this as a part of a great historic policy, and ask whether England owes much or owes little to that policy having been pursued. We have made efforts to secure a stra- tegic position to a valuable ally. We have taken up an im- portant and most valuable Naval station ; we have strengthened, so that it is impregnable, the only assailable frontier of India ; we have made sure of our colonial possessions in the far South. But these things must not be judged individually ; their strength and merit are that they are parts of a whole, links in a long chain. They are chapters in that great historical policy which ever since the Revolution—I might say, ever since the reign of Queen Elizabeth—have been pursued. And if you would judge of their value, you must extend your view, and gaze upon the prospect as a whole." In other words, you must keep your eye on the chain of which the first link was William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, and the last is Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury. No doubt, these extreme links give unity to the chain as a whole, in spite of that unfortunate interpolation of a few debased links of Gladstone-Clarendon or Gladstone-Granville policy, to which Lord Salisbury alluded with tears in his voice as wholly unworthy of the great chain which, beginning in a Cecil, in the golden ago of Elizabeth, returns into a Cecil again, in the great Victorian era which we have now reached. What Lord Salisbury prides himself upon is—not matters of detail, but the harmony between the spirit of the policy he has directed and that of the whole course of English foreign policy, since his great ancestor struck the key- note indicating what it ought to be. Whether he has succeeded in small points, he will not say. What he will say is, that he has restored the great tradition which Burleigh, and his son, the first Lord Salisbury, struck out ; which Dutch William, Anne, with the help of Marl- borough, and the Georges, with Chatham, and Pitt, and Nelson, and Wellington, to second them, pursued ; which Lord Palmerston made famous in the earlier part of this reign, and which, after the Bad but brief epoch of Mr. Gladstone's. Ministry, it has been again a Salisbury's good-fortune to re- store. That is the claim which Lord Salisbury's historical consciousness, prompted by Mr. Anderson Rose, made to the Bank-holidaymakers at Hatfield, and it is only when criticised from that grandiose point of view that Lord Salis- bury will admit the pertinence of any criticism at all.
Well, we suppose that means that what he wants to be judged by, is the question whether the foreign policy of the present Ministry has increased the influence of England abroad, after the fashion in which the greatest Foreign Ministers of former days increased it; or has diminished it, as Lord Salisbury declares that Lord Clarendon and Lord Granville, under the influence of Mr. Gladstone's ideas, diminished it, during the years between 1868, and 1874. And so judged, we should say in all seriousness that the present Government has lowered the European influence of Eng- land after a manner in which neither anything done nor any- thing left undone during Mr. Gladstone's Administration,—and we at least thought that there were omissions in the foreign policy of that Administration,—ever tended to lower it. The fact is, that it is not till you look at it in the large way in which Lord Salisbury asks us to look at it, that the bounce and bluster of this Administration come out. Just as Lord Salis- bury has the extraordinary temerity to take credit for the cowardly descent on Afghanistan as "the most momentous Asiatic war which England over waged,"—a war in which no battle was fought, in which all we did was to march in and occupy a country broken up by internal feud,—just as he has the extraordinary temerity to describe the deliberate invasion of Zululand by Sir Bartle Frero as "an attack by savages on our colonies, which came upon us as out of a thunder-cloud," just so his estimate of the whole foreign policy of the Government is vitiated by the very contagious habit which he has, we fear, caught from his chief, of inventing fictitious history, till he almost deceives himself. Of course, Lord Salisbury does nut, !_eqle believe that the almost nnresisted march into Afghanititan can ■Ti importance for one moment with
Lord Olive's achievements, or ev... with the destruction of Tippoo Sahib, least of all with the war in whit,. we defeated the gigantic efforts of the mutineers in 1858. Nor does L.1 Salisbury really believe that the catastrophe in Zululand was broi411 about by the unexpected attack of savages upon our colonies. hei-nows perfectly well that his own Government condemned the gratin tous invasion, which he nevertheless speaks of as if it were pure self-defence ; he .knows very well that this way of putting things is mere romance, romance hardly even founded on fact. But he has got so muth into the habit of painting up his Government's achievements after Lord Beaconsfield's fashion, that he is scarcely aware how grotesque are his own misrepre- sentations. And as are his misrepresentations of the detail, such are also his misrepresentations of the total effect of what has been done. Thus he boasts that a great Treaty has been made at Berlin, and that "the most important provisions have ben ful- filled." But even he does not venture to say that the most import- ant provisions which we introduced into that Treaty,—the most important provisions which were not in the previous Treaty, but which are due to our intervention,—have been fulfilled. Per he knows that by far the most important of all those provisions, the one for which we were, it was said, ready to make war, has not only not been fulfilled, but in all probability never will be. He does not venture, again, to say that the bold convention by which we strove to balance the Treaty of Berlin,—the Anglo-Turkish Convention,—either has been fulfilled, or is likely to be fulfilled. He does not venture to assert that in Egypt,—the point most vital to English interests, English interests, moreover, being most closely in accord with the interests of Egypt itself,—the policy in- augurated by the purchase of the Suez-Canal shares, either has been, or is likely to be, carried to a successful issue. In the Balkans, our policy has been foiled by the legitimate and just hostility of the people of those regions. In Asia Minor, our policy has been foiled by the obstinacy of the Porte, and our own reluctance to hazard anything substantial for the compulsion of the Porte. In Egypt, our policy has been foiled by the fear of Prance. Look at the matter in a large way, as Lord Salisbury desires us to look at it, and our policy in the East has been a tissue of bombastic failures. We threat- ened war for the difference between the Treaty of San Stefano and the Treaty of Berlin, and lo I that difference, so far as the welfare of the East is concerned, is a negative quantity, and so far as English influence is concerned, is nil. We took Cyprus on terms at once humiliating and disadvantageous to us, for the- purpose of strengthening our influence over Asia Minor ; and our influence over Asia Minor is already admitted to be a dream. We bought the Suez-Canal shares, interfered in the government of Egypt, and finally obtained the removal of the Khedive, in order to secure our way to India, and now our way to India is probably less safe than ever ; certainly, in case of a misunderstanding with France, we might have obstacles thrown in that way by a great European Power, instead of by a small European or a small African Power. The only thing we have succeeded in is snatching from the poor Afghans the much- vaunted "scientific frontier,"—and there we were hardly resisted. And by it we have brought upon ourselves both a bad reputation and, as Sir Henry Rawlineon himself is eager to maintain, most onerous obligations. If this is keeping up the traditions of English influence abroad, the traditions of English influence abroad must have been humiliating indeed, Lord Burghley, it was said, secured Elizabeth a great influence on the Continent of Europe, at less cost than any Sovereign ever before paid for such an in- fluence. Lord Salisbury has emulated his ancestor in the effort to do a great deal for a comparatively small cost,—but the great deal has not been done, and the comparatively small cost has been -much larger than was expected. And we are left in the ridi- culous position of owning that what we grasped at was quite beyond us, and that our policy was a policy of make-believe, and not of thrifty but sure advancement. Except the gain of Cyprus, which has been a gain under false pretences, and not clear gain after all, as we are hampered in all our reforms by the tribute we pay to the Sultan for the island,—we have lost our whole game in the East of Europe, and gained it in India only by violent aggression ; we have played into the hands of Russia; we have got nothing but empty promises out of the Turk ; we have set the great Eastern populations of the future against us ; we have alienated Greeks, Bulgarians, Servians, Montenegrins, and Egyptians, only to boast that
Turkey still sits astride of the Bosphorus, too weak to hold its gates, and too sick of us and our counsels to be in the humour to call us in, if she were ever tempted to leave her post. This was not the sort of policy which the first Cecil would have approved, though it appears to be regarded as a stroke of ,genius by the last.
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