WHAT SHALL BE DONE WITH TURKEY IN EUROPE?

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 4768, 4 July 1876, Page 3

WHAT SHALL BE DONE WITH TURKEY IN EUROPE?

(From the Nm York Herald.) In their dealings with the problems presented by the condition of lurkey, the great Powers in Europe make haste slowly. Occupation of all the provinces north of the -Balkan by the troops of Russia and Austria is the objective point of the diplomatic game now on hand in the various capitals ; but the parties to the game, for reasons doubtless satisfactory to themselves, choose to contemplate the case as if such a consequence were to.bo deprecated or regarded with dismay. is rather franker in this respect than her neighbors and allies. She does not pretend to respect the Ottoman Power, nor to believe that it can maintain itself, or should be assisted and encouraged by Christian governments in its oppression of a Christian people. It is tine Russia has two aspects in the case. She runs with the hare and hunts with the hounds. Rightly typified for once by her Imperial eagle, she has one eye on the round of secular sovereignty and another on the emblem of Christian faith. In the confabulations of the diplomats she seems to recognise the Sultan’s rights as she might those of any other potentate, and to deal with them strictly on political grounds ; but when ahe turns to the down-trodden Slavs on the Danube, she speaks like a crusader. Constantinople is the capital city of the Russian religion. Just as the Christian people of all countries in the ages before Lutherturned their eyes to Rome, just as the Catholic people of every country still turn their eyes thither, so the Russian people turn their eyes towards Constantinople as a sacred city—the

" Home of tho Eastern Church-and they regard the presence of the Moslem there precisely as the crusaders regarded his presence Jerusalem. Although the crusading spirit has been dead in Western Europe ever since political economy has been studied, and though religion in our part of the world is in a great degree free from all the deep attachments of locality—since Catholics regard the head of their Church and not so much the city in' which he dwells—it must be remembered that the primitive condition with respect to ideas of this class persists in Russia, and that the people there are emotionally and- intellectually very near what the people of 1 ranee and England were in the Middle Ages. Every Russian government, therefore, that would not entirely cut free from a sympathetic relation with the people must keep this fact in view, aud must respect the prejudices and the passions m the li"ht of which the nation regards the intruding infidel with his foot on the necks of men whom the Russians contemplate as brothers because they are both Christians aud Slavs. It is not strange, therefore, that the Russian government 0 speaks encouragingly to the revolting people and lets the Russian nation hear only menaces of its wrath at Moslem misrule, while in Berlin and Vienna, where it must remember that a balance of power is still believed in, it adopts a different tone aud demeanor. I hat the St,, Petersburg government plays this role of necessary and perhaps unwilling hypocrisy on a grand scale is one of the evident facts of European politics. Doubtless every government assumes in the presence of other governments a very different attitude from that it holds before its own people, but this is only flagrant in the case of Russia. Austria is no fonder of the Sultan than Russia is ; but her assumption of faith in his future possibilities, her snperserviceable readiness to construct protocols and programmes of reform, to put him in the moral straightjacket of Western political ideas, is her admission that she is not altogether ready to meet the case of his final fall in any other way. It is her cue to stand as the Sultan’s next friend. Every power situated as Austria is must have peace on her frontiers if and with this necessity guaranteed, it is her interest to have for a neighbor just such a State as Turkey. At least, this is the interest of a nation as viewed in the light of the policy that governs monarchial States in Europe, where the prosperity of the people is less regarded than the contingency of foreign war. At the time that Louis Napoleon -assented to _ those projects of Cavour which resulted in the unity of Italy M. Thiers pointed out that the sovereign of Erance was constructing on his frontiers a power that might prove dangerous. In the progress of the warlike and diplomatic dramas that ended in putting the armed force of Germany at the command of Berlin the old politician continued his admonitions on this key, but was answered with rubbish conceived -in a spirit of sentimental politics, until the Empire and Erance fell in a common ruin. So long as States must have more reason to fear the growth of their neighbors than to desire the advancement of their own people this policy will be a good one ; it is therefore the natural policy of every monarchical State that has not gone so far in the development of restraints, limitationss, and other constitutional contrivances as to approach the republican system, Austria, therefore, acts naturally in her assumption that all that tho Sultan’s government needs is a little patching up —a few paper programmes—a little reform in the collection of the taxes. If by this friendly attitude towards the Sultan she can secure his .assent that she shall have the right at all times to tranquilise the frontier by marching her troops into revolted districts on the border, and if by the pretence toward Europe that the Sultan’s government still has all needful vitality, she can keep the Moslem for a neighbor rather than have the Tartar too near her, she will have escaped very handsomely from a great crisis. But it appears very unlikely that she can secure this result, for the facts of the case are against her in the country in revolt, and a point of perhaps still greater consequence is that in the complication of general European politics this difficulty may become an important makeweight. Austria cannot smuggle out of sight in her own interest a fact that may incline a doubtful balance in which is the interest of several other nations. As to the condition of the revolted provinces, it is impossible to conceive it worse than we know it to be. In Bulgaria the Turkish authorities take away the children of their Christian subjects and hold them as hostages for advanced payment of taxes. Cruelty more heartless and horrible than this was never practised on any people in the name of government. The poor Moslems are scarcely less oppressed and wretched than the Christians, and if the threat to arm the Moslems is acted upon, it will not be so much the launching their ferocity against their fellow sufferers°as the giving up of the whole country to brigandage, murder, and barbarism. With all the absolute bankruptcy of the government will be evident at an early day. The Sultan will die this summer, his physicians say, and his nephew and heir-at-law is regarded as even less fit for a throne than the present ruler. It is a political cataclysm, therefore—a case that the Vienna diplomatists cannot cover up with reams of parchment.

In the scheme of Continental politics the consequence of these facts is that Prussia has the opportunity to give away this coveted territory on the Danube. Though she will hardly offend Russia, she seems to coquet with Austria. The Berlin government has aspirations for colonial development. It has its agents in Abyssinia, and it will scarcely permit Egypt, if the Ottoman Empire is to fall altogether, to pass into the hands of England. If England is to be made an enemy by such a dispute, it would not do to put Austria in such a position that England, Prance, and Austria would be tempted to act together against Germany and Russia, for that would not be a one-sided conflict. Perhaps a great independent Bulgarian State may prove the only solution of the difficulty. _