THE EASTERN QUESTION.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1316, 20 May 1897, Page 31

THE EASTERN QUESTION.

LETTER TO THE DUKE OP WESTMINSTER. FROM " A PERSON POLITICALLY DEAD." r We have to acknowledge our indebtedness to the London Daily Chronicle for the following letter from the pen of William Ewart Gladstone —a letter which we feel that every reader will truly appreciate. The enterprise of the proprietors of the Chronicle has become proverbial, and the fact that they secured the sole right of publication of Mr Gladstone's letter, which is characterised by one of the leading Conservative journals of England as " one of his best and most pithy performances," must win for the great London newspaper the admiration of many thousands of English-speaking people:— Mr dear Duke of Westminster, — Had we, at the present date, been in our ordinary relation of near neighbourhood you ■would have run no risk of being addressed by me in print without your previous knowledge or permission. But the present position of the Eastern question is peculiar. Transactions (such only, for the moment, I am content to call them) in crowds have been occurring in the East, at short intervals, during the last two years, of such a nature as to stir our common humanity from its innermost recesses and to lodge a trustworthy appeal from the official to the personal conscience. Until the most recent dates, these transactions had seemed to awaken no echo save in England; but now a light has . flashed at least upon Western Europe, and an uneasy consciousness that nations as well as Cabinets are concerned in what has been and is going on, has taken strong hold upon the public mind, and the time seems to have come when men should

speak or be for ever silent. My ambition is for rest, and rest alone. But every grain of sand is a part of the seashore; and, connected as I have been, for nearly half a century, with the Eastern question, often when in positions of responsibility, I feel that INCLINATION DOES NOT SUFFICE TO JUSTIFY SILENCE. In yielding to this belief, I keep another conviction steadily in view. Namely, that to infuse into this discussion the spirit or the language of party would be to give a cover and apology to every sluggish and unmanly mind for refusing to offer its tribute to the common cause. And I have felt that, taking into view the attitude you have consistently held in our domestic politics during the last decade of years, I can afford my countrymen of all opinions no more appropriate guarantee for my ' careful fidelity to this conviction, than, if only by the exercise of an unusual freedom, to place the expression of my views under the shelter of your name. It is the more easy thus to forego the libeity and license of partisanship, because it is my firm inward beb'ef that the deplorable position, which the concerted action, or non-action, of tho Powers of Europe has brought about and maintained, has been mainly due, not to a common accord, but to the want of it j that the unwise and mistaken views of some Powers have brought dishonour upon the wnole, and that when the time comes for the distribution with full knowledge of praise W blame, it will not be on the . British Government, or on those in sympathy with fctM #w heaviest sentence of condemna-

tion will descend. Let us succinctly review the situation. THE ARMENIAN MASSACRES, judiciously interspersed with intervals of breathing-time, have surpassed in their scale, and in the intensity and diversity of their wickedness, all modern, if not all historical experience. All this was done under the eyes of the six Powers, who were represented by their Ambassadors, and who thought their feeble verbiage a sufficient counterpoise to the instruments of death, shame and torture, provided that in frami ing it they all chimed in with one another. Growing in confidence with each successive triumph of deeds over words, and having exhausted in Armenia every expedient of deliberate and wholesale wickedness, the Sultan, whom I have not scrupled to call the Great Assassin, recollected that he had not yet reached his climax; it yet remained to show to the Powers and their Ambassadors, under their own eyes and within hearing of their own ears, in Constantinople itself, what their organs were too dull to see and hear from amid the fastnesses of Armenian hills. To this height of daring he boldly ascended, and his triumph was not less complete than before. They did, indeed, make bold to interfere with his prerogatives by protecting or exporting some Armenians who would otherwise have swelled the festering heaps of those murdered in the streets of Constantinople. But as to punishment, i reparation or even prevention, the world ' has yet to learn that any one of them was effectually cared for. Every extreme of wickedness is sacrosanct when it passes in a Turkish garb. All corners may (as in a tournament of old) be challenged to point to any two years of diplomatic history which have been marked by a more glaring inequality of forces; by a more uniform and complete success of weakness combined with wrong over strength associated with right, of which it had unhappily neither consciousness nor confidence ; by so vast an aggregation of blood-red. records of massacre

done in the face of day; or by so profound a disgrace inflicted upon and still clinging, as a shirt of ISTessus, to collective Europe. ALL THESE TERRIBLE OCCURRENCES the six Powers appear to treat as past and gone, as dead and buried. They forget that every one of them will revive in history, to say nothing of a higher record still. And in proceeding calmly to handle those further developments of the great drama which are now in progress, they appear blissfully unconscious that at every step they take they are treading on the burning cinders of the Armenian massacres. To inform and sway the public mind amidst the disastrous confusions of the last two years, there have been set up, as supreme and guiding ideas, those expressed firstly in the phrase

"THE CONCERT OF EUROPE," and secondly " the integrity of the Turkish Empire." Of these phrases the first denotes an instrument indescribably valuable where it can be made available for purposes of good. But it is an instrument only ; and as such it must be tried by the question of adaptation to its ends. When it can be made subservient to the purposes of honour, duty, liberty, and humanity, it has the immense and otherwise unattainable advantage of leaving the selfish aims of each Power to neutralise and destroy one another, and of acting with resistless force for such objects as will bear the light. In the years 1876-80, it was the influence of England in European diplomacy which principally distracted the Concert of the Powers. In determining the particulars of the Treaty of mad,© herself eon-

spicuous by taking the side least favourable to liberty in the East. In that state of things I for one used my best exertions to set up the European Concert in public estimation. It would at least have qualified our activity in support of Turkey, which had then sufficiently displayed her iniquitous character and policy in Bulgaria, though she has since surpassed herself.

When the Ministry of 1880 came into power we made it one of our first objects to organise the European Concert for the purpose of procuring the fulfilment of two important provisions of the Treaty of 1878, referring to Montenegro and to Greece respectively. Pair and smiling were the first results of our endeavours. The forces of suasion had been visibly exhausted, and the emblems of force were accordingly displayed; a squadron, consisting of ships of war carrying the flags of each of the Powers, being speedily gathered on the Montenegrin, or Albanian, coast. But we soon discovered that, for several of the Powers, the Concert of Europe bore signification totally at variance with that which we attached to it, and included toy-demonstrations, which might be made under the condition that they should not pass into reality. We did not waste our time in vain endeavours to galvanise a corpse, but framed a plan for the

SEIZURE OF AN IMPORTANT PORT OP THE SULTAN'S DOMINIONS. To this we confidently believed that some of the Powers would accede, and m concert with these we prepared to go forward. It hardly needs to be said that we found a £>rincipal support in the wise and brave Alexander 11., who then reigned over Russia. Still less need it be specified that there was no "war in Europe," though doubtless this bugbear would have been used for intimidation had our proceedings passed beyond the stage of privacy. But the effect was perfect; the'effect produced, be it observed, on Abdul Hamid, on him who has since proved himself to be the Great Assassin. Our plan became known to the Sultan;. and, without our encountering a single serious difficulty, Montenegro obtained the considerable extension which she now enjoys, and Thessaly was I added to Greece.

But as nothing can be better, nay, nothing so good, as the Concert of Europe where it can be made to work, so, as the best when in its corruption always changes to the worst, nothing can be more mischievous than the pretence to be working with this tool, when it is not really in working order. The Concert of Europe then comes to mean the concealment of dissents, the lapse into generalities, and the settling down upon negations at junctures when duty loudly calls for positive action. LORD GRANVILLE was the mildest of men, but mildness may keep company with resolution; and we have seen how he dealt with the Concert of Europe. Very brief intercommunications enable a man of common sense to see, in cases where the principles involved are clear, whether there is a true Concert. But the mischief of setting up a false one is immense. Let us look at it in some of its aspects: First, the criminal at once becomes aware of it, and sets to work to flatter and seduce the Power he may have reason to suppose best inclined. Secondly, what is the composition of the body ? A Cabinet can work together because it has a common general purpose, and this purpose has a unifying effect on particular questions as they arise. But the Powers of Europe have no such commmon purpose to bring them together. Lastly, and what is worst of all, this pretended and ineffectual co-operation of the Governments shuts out the peoples, It is from ,

this mischief that we are now siiffering. It is difficult enough for a people to use ad hoc a sufficient influence over its Government standing- single, but what is our case when we find ourselves standing in the face of our Government with five other Governments behind it, which we cannot call fco account, and over which we cannot reasonably expect to exercise the smallest influence ? IT IS TIME TO SPE&IC WITH FREEDOM. At this moment two great States, with an European population of 140,000,000 or, perhaps, 150,000,000, are under the government of two young men, each bearing the high title of Emperor, but in one case wholly without knowledge, or experience, in the other having only such knowledge and experience, in truth limited enough, as have excited much astonishment and some consternation when an inkling of them has been given to the world. In one case the Government is a pure and perfect despotism, and the other equivalent to it in matters of foreign policy, so far as it can be understood in a land where freedom is indigenous, familiar and full-grown. These Powers, so far as their sentiments arc known, have been using their power in the Concert to fight steadily against freedom. But why are we to have our Government pinned to their aprons ? The sense of this nation is for them non-existent: and the German Emperor would lie well within his limits should he deign to say to us, "Turkey I know, and the Concert I know; but who are ye ?°

AT THE HEELS OF THIS CONCERT we have plodded patiently for Wo years, and what has it done for us ? Done for us,, not in promoting justice and humanity, for that question has long ago been answered ; but in securing peace? I affirm with all its pretension and its power, it has woisened and not bettered the situation. When we pointed to the treaty obligations and treaty rights which solemnly and separately bound us to stop the Armenian massacres, we were threatened, by the credulity of some and the hypocrisy of others, with an European war as the certain consequence of any coercive measure, however disinterested, which we might adopt for checking crimes sufficient to make the stones cry out. "Well, intimidation of this kind carried the day, and to the six Powers in their majesty and* might, with their

ARMIES NUMBERED BY MILLIONS OP MEN and resources measured by hundreds of millions of pounds a year, was entrusted the care of the public peace. It was not a very difficult task. There was not a real breath of war in the air two years and one year ago. Now Turkey has a castes belli against Greece. Greece has a casus belli against the Powers. Turkey may have one against them, too, were it her interest to raise it. So far as Turkey and Greece are concerned, this is no mere abstraction, and Europe flutters from day to day with anxiety to know whether there is, or is not, war on the Thessalian frontier.

It is surely time that we should have done, at least for the present occasion, with the gross and palpable delusion under which alone can we hop© for any effectual dealing by European Concert with the present crisis in the East. It is time to shake off the incubus, and to remember, as in days of old, that we have an existence, a character, and a duty of our own. But then we are told by the Carman Emperor and others that we can only have reforms in Turkey on the condition of maintaining the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. At one time this phrase had a meaning, &n<X was based ivpoaa thewy, TJw> theory

I propounded by men of such high authority as Lord Palmerston and Lord Stratford do Redcliff e, was that Turkey, if only she were [ sheltered by European power from the hos- \ tility of her neighbour, was alike disposed ! and competent to enter into the circle of civilised Powers. The shelter prayed for was assured by the Crimean War. AFTER THE PEACE OF PARIS IN 1856, ' she enjoyed twenty years of absolute immunity from foreign alarms. In no point f or particular, save one, did she fulfil the anticipation proclaimed on her behalf. Shs showed herself a match for any European State in wanton expenditure and rapid accumulation of debt, to which she added the natural sequel in shameless robbery of her creditors. It was at the cost of three hundred thousand lives and three hundred millions of money that the question of Turkey's capacity to take rank among civilised nations was brought to a conclusive testnegatively through the total failure of the scheme of internal reform, and, alas, positively, through THE HORRIBLE OUTRAGES WHICH DESOLATED BULGARIA and brought about a fresh mutilation of the territory. It shows an amazing courage, or an amazing infatuation, that, after a mass of experience, alike deplorable and conclusive, the rent and ragged catchword of "the integrity of the Ottoman Empire " should still be flaunted in our eyes. Has it then a meaning ? Tes, and it had a different meaning in almost every decade of the century now expiring. In the first quarter of that century it meant that Turkey, though her system was poisoned and effete, still occupied in right of actual sovereignty the whole south-eastern corner of Europe, appointed by the Almighty to be one of its choicest portions. In 1830 it meant that this baleful sovereignty had been abridged by the excision of Greece from Turkish territory. In 1860 it meant that THE DANUBIAN PRINCIPALITIES, now forming the Kingdom of Roumania, had obtained an emancipation virtually (as it is now formally) complete. In 1878 it meant that Bosnia, with Herzegovina, had bid farewell to all active concern, with Turkey, that Servia was enlarged, and that Northern Bulgaria was free. In 1880 it meant that Montenegro had crowned its glorious battle of four hundred years by achieving the acknowledgment of ita independence and obtaining a great accession of territory, and that Thessaly was added to free Greece. In 1886 it meant that Southern Bulgaria had been permitted to associate itself with its northern sisters. What is the upshot of all thi3 ? That eighteen millions of human being 3 who a century ago, peopling a large part of the Turkish Empire, were subject to ita at once paralysing and degrading yoke, are now as free from it as if they were inhabitants, of these islands, and that Greece, Roumania, Servia, Montenegro and Bulgaria stand before us as five living witnesses that, even in this world, the reign of wrong is not eternal. But still it is dinned in our ears from presses, and indeed from thrones, of the Continent that we must not allow our regard for justice, humanity and freedom of life and honour to bring into question, or put to hazard, " the integrity of the Ottoman Empire."

THE GREAT AND TERRIBLE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA is, however, for the time (I trust for the time only) out of sight if not out of mind. One hundred thousand victims (such is the number at which they are placed by Dr Lepsius, one of the lateet inquirers whose works are before the world, and who adds to other recommendations that of being a German) have sated for the time even fiendish appetite. We wait in painful uncertainty until Bunger shall return ; and in the meantime even a milder phase of Turkish horrors absorbs the mind and rouses the alarms of Europe. Of the remaining fractions of European Turkey THE ISLAND OF CRETE

has long been one of the least patient under the yoke. It was here, I think, that in one of that series of rebellions which have lately been placed before the public eye through a letter by M. Gennadios, either two or three hundred Cretans, together with their bishop driven by the last extremities of war to inclose themselves in a tower, chose rather to meet a common and universal death by causing it to explode than to encounter the horrors by which, according to Turkish usage, conquered enemies too commonly have been treated. Into one more of these struggles the gallant islanders have now entered*

We have perhaps advanced in this discussion beyond the stage at which it would have been necessary to enter largely upon, the particulars of the Cretan case, which have been stated with great force in the letter addressed by M. Gennadios to the Times, published in that newspaper on February 15 last, and still remaining, so far as I know, without a reply. But it may be well to point out that the hopelessness of the Cretan case is manifested by the long series of rebellions in which tbo islanders, though single-handed, engaged themselves against THE WHOLE STRENGTH OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE, in a struggle of life and death for deliverance. M. Gennadios enumerates the revolts of 1831, 184.1, 185 S, 1866-8, 1877-8, 1889, and finally 1896 ; these figures carry with them their own demonstrative efficiency. It is not in human nature, except under circumstances of grinding and destructive oppression, to renew a struggle so unequal. The details of that oppression, and of the perfidy with which pretended concessions to the Cretans were neutralised and undermined, and of the truly Turkish manoeuvre by which a Mahometan minority was set on from Constantinople to carry on a»

must be sought in their proper place, the histories of the time. This simple aggregate o£ the facts, presented in outline, once for all convicts the Central Power, and shows that it has no title to retain its sanguinary and ineffectual dominion. " It is needless to go further. We are really dealing with a res judicata. For, though not of their own free will, the six Powers have taken into their own hands the pacifiation of the island, and the determination of its future. But we must not suppose that we owe this intervention to a recrudescence of spirit and courage in counsels that had hitherto resulted in a concert of miserable poltroonery. A new actor, governed by a new temper, has appeared upon the stage. Hot one equipped with powerful fleets, large armies/ and boundless treasures supplied by uncounted millions. A potty Power, hardly counting in the list of European States, suddenly takes its place in the midway of THE CONFLICT BETWEEN TURKEY AND ITS CRETAN INSURGENTS. But it was. a Power representing the race that had fought the battles of Therinopyla? and Salamis, and had hurled back the hordes of Asia from European shores. In the heroic age of .Greece, as Homer tells ris, there was a champion, who was small of stature, but full of fight. He had in a little body a great soul, and he seems to have been reproduced in the recent and marvellously gallant action of Greece. It is sad to reflect.that we have also before us the reverse; of the picture in the six Powers, who offer to the world the most conspicuous example of the reverse, and present to us a huge body, animated, or rather tenanted, by a feeble heart. We have then before us, it is literally true, A DAVID FACING SIX GOLIATHS. ITor is he so easily disposed of as might have been anticipated. And what the world seems to understand is this, that there is life in the Cretan matter; that this life has been infused into it exclusively by Grecian action ; and that if, under the merciful providences of God, and by paths which it is hard as yet to trace, the island. is to find her liberation, that inestimable boon will be owing, not to any of the great Governments of Europe, for they are ■paralysed by dissension, nor even to any of the great peoples of Europe, for the door is shut in their faces by " the Concert of Europe," but to the small and physically insignificant race known as the Greeks. Whatever good shall be permitted to emerge from the existing chaos will lie to their credit, and to theirs alone. Is it to be wondered at that Greece should have endeavoured to give aid to the Cretans ? Often as they rise in rebellion, and as their efforts, due to Turkish blindness and bad faith, are encountered by 'lawless cruelty, they fly in crowds to Greece, which is their only refuge, and that poor country has to stand, and stand alone, between them and starvation. As to their Turkish masters, it is not to be expected that they should find any cause for uneasiness in such a state of things. For ever since that evil day, the darkest, perhaps, in the whole known history of humanity, when THEIR STAR, REEKING WITH GORE, ROSE ABOVE THE HORIZON, has it not been their policy and constant aim to depopulate the regions which they ruled ? The title of Turkey da jure is in truth given up on all hands. In the meagre catalogue of the things Avhich the six united Powers have done, there is this at least included, that they have taken out of the hands of the Sultan the care and administration of the island. If Turkey h'as the proper rights of a governing Power, every act they have done and are doing, ' and-their presence in Canea itself, is a # ross breach of international law. It is the violence, cruelty, and perfidy of the Otfto- • .r.n rule which alone gives them any title to ' interfere. The intention which has 7.'v ■on "announced on their behalf, an announcement incredible but true, was that, when the Greek forces should have left the island, the Turkish soldiery, THE PROVED BUTCHERS OF ARMENIA --the same body, and, very probably, the same corps and persons—were to remain as of order in the island. But the ;V Powers have no more right than I have either to confer or to limit this commission, •unless the Sultan, by his misconduct, has forfeited his right to rule. Autonomy, too, is announced for Crete, and not by his authority, but by theirs. . - Crete being thus derelict m point of lawful sovereignty, does all reversionary care for it fall "to the six Powers ? Are wo really to commence our twentieth century under the shadow of a belief that conventions set up by the policy of the moment are everything, and that community of

' blood, religion, _ history, sympathy and i interest are nothing ? HOW STANDS THE CASE OF CRETE IN RELATION TO GREECE ? Do what you will by the might of brute power, " a man's a man for a" that," and in respect of everything that makes a man to be a man, every Cretan is a 9 reek. The Ottoman rule in Crete is a thing of yesterday ; but Crete was part of Greece, the Cretan people of the Greek people, at least 3000 years ago, nor have the moral and human ties between them ever been either broken or relaxed. And in the long years and centuries to come, when this bad dream of Ottoman dominion shall have passed away from Europe, that union will still subsist, and cannot but prevail as Ion;? as the human heart beats in the human bosom. IN THE MIDST OF A HIGH AND SELFSACRIFICING ENTHUSIASM, the Greek Government and people have shown good sense. In pleading that the sense of the people of Crete, not the momentary and partial sense, but that which is deliberate and general, the Greeks have placed themselves upon a ground of indestructible strength. They are quite right in declining to stand upon an abstract objection to the suzerainty of Turkey. If it so pleases the Powers, why should not Crete be autonomously united with Greece, and yet not detached in theory from the body of the Ottoman Empire ? Such an arrangement would not' be without example. Bosnia and_ Herzegovina are administered by Austria; but I apprehend that they have never been formally severed from the over-lordship of the Sultan. Cyprus is similarly administered by Great Britain, and European history is full of cases in which paramount or full sovereignty in one territory has been united with secondary or subordinate lordship in another. I quote the case of 1 Cyprus as a precedent, and I apprehend that so far it is good; while I subjoin the satisfaction I should feel, were it granted me, before the close of my long- life, to see the population of that Hellenic island placed by a friendly arrangement in organic union with their brethren of the kingdom and of Crete. But, in thus INDICATING A POSSIBLE SOLUTION, I claim for it no authority, I exclude no other alternative compatible with the prinI ciples which have been established by the situation. These I take to be that, by the testimony alike of living authority and of facts, Turkish rule in Crete exists only as a shadow of the past, and has no place in the future; that there is no organ upon earth (subject to independent provisions on behalf of the minority) so competent or so well entitled to define a prospective position for the people, as that people itself. Further, it remains to be recognised that, at the present juncture, Greece, whom some seem disposed to treat as a criminal and disturber, has by her bold action CONFERRED A GREAT SERVICE UPON EUROPE. She has made it impossible to palter with this question as we paltered with the bloodstained question of Armenia. She has extricated it from the meshes of diplomacy, and placed it on the order of the day for definitive solution. I can remember no case in which so small a State has conferred so great a benefit. As to the notion that Greece is to be coerced and punished, I hardly like to sully the page on which I write by the mention of an alternative so detestable. It would be about as rational to transport the Greek nation (who are in this as one man) to Siberia by what I believe is called an "administrative order." If anyone has such a scheme of policy to propose, I advise his proposing it anywhere rather than in England. Let it bo borne in mind that in this unhappy business all along, under cover of " the Concert of Europe," power and speech have been the monopoly of the Governments and their organs, while the people have been simt out. GIVE US, A£ LENGTH, BOTH LIGHT AND AIR. The nations of Europe are in very various stages of their training, but I do not believe there is an European whose judgment, could it be had, would ordain or tolerate the infliction of punishment upon Greece for the good deed she has recently performed. Certainly it would not be the French, who so largely contributed to the foundation of the kingdom, nor the Italians, still so mindful of what they and their fathers have undergone ; and least of all I will say the English, to whom the air of freedom is the very breath of their nostrils, who have already shown in every way open to them how they are minded, and who, were the road now laid open to them by a dissolution of Parliament, would show it by returning a Parliament which upon that ' question would speak with unanimity,

Waiving any further trespass on your time by a repetition of apologies, I remain, my dear Duke,— Sincerely yours, W. E. Gladstone. Chateau Thorenc, Cannes, March 13, 1597.