Lord Salisbury's Foreign Policy.

Feilding Star, Volume XX, Issue 63, 13 September 1898, Page 2

Lord Salisbury's Foreign Policy.

'London Spectator) Lord Salisbury has been steering the ship during the past throe years through the narrowest of practicable channels, and has hit upou none of the hidden rocks with which it was studded. Was it Lord t?a!is.bnry or i\Tr Olaey who was beaten in the Venezuela quarrel?— a quarrel which, as we can all now see, would, had it it suited in war,. have destroyed the most promising prospect ever opened out before" Oreat Britain, America, and, as we shall always maintain, mankind. Lord Salisbury did not sncceed in defeating Turkey or organising Crete, but it was because had ho adopted any other policy than the one he did he would have risked, almost certainly would have produced, that geueral European war from which everybody, British electors included, shrank back appalled, W e thought, and think, he was mistaken in so shrinking, a peremptory duty tequiring the country to run the risk of protecting the Armenians ; but the electors did not think so, and we ourselves have always acknowledged that if the responsibility of tuviug the orders had fallen to us, we might have fonnd it too terrible to face. It takes statesmen of iron, supported by a resolved people, to order the shot which may set the world on fire ; and if Lord Salisbury was not iron, he certaiuly was not supported by a resolved people, We never remember more hesitation than we saw among them wheu they perceived that to send a fleet to the Dardanelles might precipitate that vast conflagration of which all Europe was afraid. On the Indian, frontier there was certainly no failnro of energy or nerve, or preparation upon the largest scale, and for the present, at Jeasfc, the Government has wop, and won— for that is the really wonderful feature of that war— without exasperating the subdued. Let the electors think for one moment of what the French would say about r a war in which they defeated every tribe opposed to them* and every tribe offered unasked to be their faithful soldiers.