READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

A HISTORY OF MODERN EUROPE FROM 1792 TO 1878

CHAPTER XXV

EASTERN AFFAIRS

The storm of 1870 was followed by some years of European calm. France, recovering with wonderful rapidity from the wounds inflicted by the war, paid with ease the instalments of its debt to Germany, and saw its soil liberated from the foreigner before the period fixed by the Treaty of Frankfort.

The efforts of a reactionary Assembly were kept in check by M. Thiers; the Republic, as the form of government which divided Frenchmen the least, was preferred by him to the monarchical restoration which might have won France allies at some of the European Courts. For two years Thiers baffled or controlled the royalist majority at Versailles which sought to place the Comte de Chambord or the chief of the House of Orleans on the throne, and thus saved his country from the greatest of all perils, the renewal of civil war. In 1873 he fell before a combination of his opponents, and McMahon succeeded to the Presidency, only to find that the royalist cause was made hopeless by the refusal of the Comte de Chambord to adopt the Tricolour flag, and that France, after several years of trial, definitely preferred the Republic. Meanwhile, Prince Bismarck had known how to frustrate all plans for raising a coalition against victorious Germany among the Powers which had been injured by its successes, or whose interests were threatened by its greatness. He saw that a Bourbon or a Napoleon on the throne of France would find far more sympathy and confidence at Vienna and St. Petersburg than the shifting chief of a Republic, and ordered Count Arnim, the German Ambassador at Paris, who wished to promote a Napoleonic restoration, to desist from all attempts to weaken the Republican Government. At St. Petersburg, where after the misfortunes of 1815 France had found its best friends, the German statesman had as yet little to fear. Bismarck had supported Russia in undoing the Treaty of Paris; in announcing the conclusion of peace with France, the German Emperor had assured the Czar in the most solemn language that his services in preventing the war of 1870 from becoming general should never be forgotten; and, whatever might be the feeling of his subjects, Alexander II continued to believe that Russia could find no steadier friend than the Government of Berlin.

With Austria Prince Bismarck had a more difficult part to play. He could hope for no real understanding so long as Beust remained at the head of affairs. But the events of 1870, utterly frustrating Beust's plans for a coalition against Prussia, and definitely closing for Austria all hope of recovering its position within Germany, had shaken the Minister's position. Bismarck was able to offer to the Emperor Francis Joseph the sincere and cordial friendship of the powerful German Empire, on the condition that Austria should frankly accept the work of 1866 and 1870. He had dissuaded his master after the victory of Koniggratz from annexing any Austrian territory; he had imposed no condition of peace that left behind it a lasting exasperation; and he now reaped the reward of his foresight. Francis Joseph accepted the friendship offered him from Berlin, and dismissed Count Beust from office, calling to his place the Hungarian Minister Andrassy, who, by conviction as well as profession, welcomed the establishment of a German Empire, and the definite abandonment by Austria of its interference in German affairs. In the summer of 1872 the three Emperors, accompanied by their Ministers, met in Berlin. No formal alliance was made, but a relation was established of sufficient intimacy to insure Prince Bismarck against any efforts that might be made by France to gain an ally. For five years this so-called League of the three Emperors continued in more or less effective existence, and condemned France to isolation. In the apprehension of the French people, Germany, gorged with the five milliards but still lean and ravenous, sought only for some new occasion for war. This was not the case. The German nation had entered unwillingly into the war of 1870; that its ruler, when once his great aim had been achieved, sought peace not only in word but in deed the history of subsequent years has proved. The alarms which at intervals were raised at Paris and elsewhere had little real foundation; and when next the peace of Europe was broken, it was not by a renewal of the struggle on the Vosges, but by a conflict in the East, which, terrible as it was in the sufferings and the destruction of life which it involved, was yet no senseless duel between two jealous nations, but one of the most fruitful in results of all modern wars, rescuing whole provinces from Ottoman dominion, and leaving behind it in place of a chaos of outworn barbarism at least the elements for a future of national independence among the Balkan population.

In the summer of 1875 Herzegovina rose against its Turkish masters, and in Bosnia conflicts broke out between Christians and Mohammedans. The insurrection was vigorously, though privately, supported by Servia and Montenegro, and for some months baffled all the efforts made by the Porte for its suppression. Many thousands of the Christians, flying from a devastated land and a merciless enemy, sought refuge beyond the Austrian frontier, and became a burden upon the Austrian Government. The agitation among the Slavic neighbours and kinsmen of the insurgents threatened the peace of Austria itself, where Slav and Magyar were almost as ready to fall upon one another as Christian and Turk. Andrassy entered into communications with the Governments of St. Petersburg and Berlin as to the adoption of a common line of policy by the three Empires towards the Porte; and a scheme of reforms, intended to effect the pacification of the insurgent provinces, was drawn up by the three Ministers in concert with one another.

This project, which was known as the Andrassy Note, and which received the approval of England and France, demanded from the Porte the establishment of full and entire religious liberty, the abolition of the farming of taxes, the application of the revenue produced by direct taxation in Bosnia and Herzegovina to the needs of those provinces themselves, the institution of a Commission composed equally of Christians and Mohammedans to control the execution of these reforms and of those promised by the Porte, and finally the improvement of the agrarian condition of the population by the sale to them of waste lands belonging to the State. The Note demanding these reforms was presented in Constantinople on the 31st of January, 1876. The Porte, which had already been lavish of promises to the insurgents, raised certain objections in detail, but ultimately declared itself willing to grant in substance the concessions which were specified by the Powers.

Armed with this assurance, the representatives of Austria now endeavoured to persuade the insurgents to lay down their arms and the refugees to return to their homes. But the answer was made that promises enough had already been given by the Sultan, and that the question was, not what more was to be written on a piece of paper, but how the execution of these promises was to be enforced. Without some guarantee from the Great Powers of Europe the refugees refused to place themselves again at the mercy of the Turk, and the leaders in Herzegovina refused to disband their troops. The conflict broke out afresh with greater energy; the intervention of the Powers, far from having produced peace, roused the fanatical passions of the Mohammedans both against the Christian rayahs and against the foreigner to whom they had appealed. A wave of religious, of patriotic agitation, of political disquiet, of barbaric fury, passed over the Turkish Empire. On the 6th of May the Prussian and the French Consuls at Salonika were attacked and murdered by the mob. In Smyrna and Constantinople there were threatening movements against the European inhabitants; in Bulgaria, the Circassian settlers and the hordes of irregular troops whom the Government had recently sent into that province waited only for the first sign of an expected insurrection to fall upon their prey and deluge the land with blood.

As soon as it became evident that peace was not to be produced by Count Andrassy's Note, the Ministers of the three Empires determined to meet one another with the view of arranging further diplomatic steps to be taken in common. Berlin, which the Czar was about to visit, was chosen as the meeting-place; the date of the meeting was fixed for the second week in May. It was in the interval between the dispatch of Prince Bismarck's invitation and the arrival of the Czar, with Prince Gortschakoff and Count Andrassy, that intelligence came of the murder of the Prussian and French Consuls at Salonika. This event gave a deeper seriousness to the deliberations now held. The Ministers declared that if the representatives of two foreign Powers could be thus murdered in broad daylight in a peaceful town under the eyes of the powerless authorities, the Christians of the insurgent provinces might well decline to entrust themselves to an exasperated enemy. An effective guarantee for the execution of the promises made by the Porte had become absolutely necessary. The conclusions of the Ministers were embodied in a Memorandum, which declared that an armistice of two months must be imposed on the combatants; that the mixed Commission mentioned in the Andrassy Note must be at once called into being, with a Christian native of Herzegovina at its head; and that the reforms promised by the Porte must be carried out under the superintendence of the representatives of the European Powers. If before the end of the armistice the Porte should not have given its assent to these terms, the Imperial Courts declared that they must support these diplomatic efforts by measures of a more effective character.

On the same day that this Memorandum was signed, Prince Bismarck invited the British, the French, and Italian Ambassadors to meet the Russian and the Austrian Chancellors at his residence. They did so. The Memorandum was read, and an urgent request was made that Great Britain France, and Italy would combine with the Imperial Courts in support of the Berlin Memorandum as they had in support of the Andrassy Note. As Prince Gortschakoff and Andrassy were staying in Berlin only for two days longer, it was hoped that answers might be received by telegraph within forty-eight hours. Within that time answers arrived from the French and Italian Governments accepting the Berlin Memorandum; the reply from London did not arrive till five days later; it announced the refusal of the Government to join in the course proposed. Pending further negotiations on this subject, French, German, Austrian, Italian, and Russian ships of war were sent to Salonika to enforce satisfaction for the murder of the Consuls. The Cabinet of London, declining to associate itself with the concert of the Powers, and stating that Great Britain, while intending nothing in the nature of a menace, could not permit territorial changes to be made in the East without its own consent, dispatched the fleet to Besika Bay.

Up to this time little attention had been paid in England to the revolt of the Christian subjects of the Porte or its effect on European politics. Now, however, a series of events began which excited the interest and even the passion of the English people in an extraordinary degree. The ferment in Constantinople was deepening. On the 29th of May the Sultan Abdul Aziz was deposed by Midhat Pasha and Hussein Avni, the former the chief of the party of reform, the latter the representative of the older Turkish military and patriotic spirit which Abdul Aziz had incensed by his subserviency to Russia. A few days later the deposed Sultan was murdered. Hussein Avni and another rival of Midhat were assassinated by a desperado as they sat at the council; Murad V., who had been raised to the throne, proved imbecile; and Midhat, the destined regenerator of the Ottoman Empire as many outside Turkey believed, grasped all but the highest power in the State. Towards the end of June reports reached western Europe of the repression of an insurrection in Bulgaria with measures of atrocious violence. Servia and Montenegro, long active in support of their kinsmen who were in arms, declared war. The reports from Bulgaria, at first vague, took more definite form; and at length the correspondents of German as well as English newspapers, making their way to the district south of the Balkans, found in villages still strewed with skeletons and human remains the terrible evidence of what had passed. The British Ministry, relying upon the statements of Sir H. Elliot, Ambassador at Constantinople, at first denied the seriousness of the massacres: they directed, however, that investigations should be made on the spot by a member of the Embassy; and Mr. Baring, Secretary of Legation, was sent to Bulgaria with this duty. Baring's report confirmed the accounts which his chief had refused to believe, and placed the number of the victims, rightly or wrongly, at not less than twelve thousand.

The Bulgarian massacres acted on Europe in 1876 as the massacre of Chios had acted on Europe in 1822. In England especially they excited the deepest horror, and completely changed the tone of public opinion towards the Turk. Hitherto the public mind had scarcely been conscious of the questions that were at issue in the East. Herzegovina, Bosnia, Bulgaria, were not familiar names like Greece; the English people hardly knew where these countries were, or that they were not inhabited by Turks. The Crimean War had left behind it the tradition of friendship with the Sultan; it needed some lightning-flash, some shock penetrating all ranks of society, to dispel once and for all the conventional idea of Turkey as a community resembling a European State, and to bring home to the English people the true condition of the Christian races of the Balkan under their Ottoman masters. But this the Bulgarian massacres effectively did; and from this time the great mass of the English people, who had sympathised so strongly with the Italians and the Hungarians in their struggle for national independence, were not disposed to allow the influence of Great Britain to be used for the perpetuation of Turkish ascendency over the Slavic races. There is little doubt that if in the autumn of 1876 the nation had had the opportunity of expressing its views by a Parliamentary election, it would have insisted on the adoption of active measures in concert with the Powers which were prepared to force reform upon the Porte. But the Parliament of 1876 was but two years old; the majority which supported the Government was still unbroken; and at the head of the Cabinet there was a man gifted with extraordinary tenacity of purpose, with great powers of command over others, and with a clear, cold, untroubled apprehension of the line of conduct which he intended to pursue. It was one of the strangest features of this epoch that a Minister who in a long career had never yet exercised the slightest influence upon foreign affairs, and who was not himself English by birth, should have impressed in such an extreme degree the stamp of his own individuality upon the conduct of our foreign policy; that he should have forced England to the very front in the crisis through which Europe was passing; and that, for good or for evil, he should have reversed the tendency which since the Italian war of 1859 had seemed ever to be drawing England further and further away from Continental affairs.

Disraeli's conception of Parliamentary politics was an ironical one. It had pleased the British nation that the leadership of one of its great political parties should be won by a man of genius only on the condition of accommodating himself to certain singular fancies of his contemporaries; and for twenty years, from the time of his attacks upon Sir Robert Peel for the abolition of the corn-laws down to the time when he educated his party into the democratic Reform Bill of 1867, Disraeli with an excellent grace suited himself to the somewhat strange parts which he was required to play. But after 1874, when he was placed in office at the head of a powerful majority in both Houses of Parliament and of a submissive Cabinet, the antics ended; the epoch of statesmanship, and of statesmanship based on the leader's own individual thought not on the commonplace of public creeds, began. At a time when Cavour was rice-growing and Bismarck unknown outside his own county, Disraeli had given to the world in Tancred his visions of Eastern Empire. Mysterious chieftains planned the regeneration of Asia by a new crusade of Arab and Syrian votaries of the one living faith, and lightly touched on the transfer of Queen Victoria's Court from London to Delhi. Nothing indeed is perfect; and Disraeli's eye was favoured with such extraordinary perceptions of the remote that it proved a little uncertain in its view of matters not quite without importance nearer home. He thought the attempt to establish Italian independence a misdemeanour; he listened to Bismarck’s ideas on the future of Germany, and described them as the vapourings of a German baron. For a quarter of a century Disraeli had dazzled and amused the House of Commons without, as it seemed, drawing inspiration from any one great cause or discerning any one of the political goals towards which the nations of Europe were tending. At length, however, the time came for the realization of his own imperial policy; and before the Eastern question had risen conspicuously above the horizon in Europe, Disraeli, as Prime Minister of England, had begun to act in Asia and Africa. He sent the Prince of Wales to hold Durbars and to hunt tigers amongst the Hindoos; he proclaimed the Queen Empress of India; he purchased the Khedive's shares in the Suez Canal. Thus far it had been uncertain whether there was much in the Minister's policy beyond what was theatrical and picturesque; but when a great part of the nation began to ask for intervention on behalf of the Eastern Christians against the Turks, they found out that Disraeli's purpose was solid enough. Animated by a deep distrust and fear of Russia, he returned to what had been the policy of Tory Governments in the days before Canning, the identification of British interests with the maintenance of Ottoman power. If a generation of sentimentalists were willing to sacrifice the grandeur of an Empire to their sympathies with an oppressed people, it was not Disraeli who would be their instrument. When the massacre of Batak was mentioned in the House of Commons, he dwelt on the honourable qualities of the Circassians; when instances of torture were alleged, he remarked that an oriental people generally terminated its connection with culprits in a more expeditious manner. There were indeed Englishmen enough who loved their country as well as Disraeli, and who had proved their love by sacrifices which Disraeli had not had occasion to make, who thought it humiliating that the greatness of England should be purchased by the servitude and oppression of other races, and that the security of their Empire should be deemed to rest on so miserable a thing as Turkish rule. These were considerations to which Disraeli did not attach much importance. He believed the one thing needful to be the curbing of Russia; and, unlike Canning, who held that Russia would best be kept in check by England's own armed co-operation with it in establishing the independence of Greece, he declined from the first to entertain any project of imposing reform on the Sultan by force, doubting only to what extent it would be possible for him to support the Sultan in resistance to other Powers. According to his own later statement he would himself, had he been left unfettered, have definitely informed the Czar that if he should make war upon the Porte England would act as its ally. Public opinion in England, however, rendered this course impossible. The knife of Circassian and Bashi-Bazouk had severed the bond with Great Britain which had saved Turkey in 1854. Disraeli-henceforward Earl of Beaconsfield-could only utter grim anathemas against Servia for presuming to draw the sword upon its rightful lord and master, and chide those impatient English who, like the greater man whose name is associated with Beaconsfield, considered that the world need not be too critical as to the means of getting rid of such an evil as Ottoman rule.

The rejection by England of the Berlin Memorandum and the proclamation of war by Servia and Montenegro were followed by the closer union of the three Imperial Courts. The Czar and the Emperor Francis Joseph, with their Ministers, met at Reichstadt in Bohemia on the 8th of July. According to official statements the result of the meeting was that the two sovereigns determined upon non-intervention for the present, and proposed only to renew the attempt to unite all the Christian Powers in a common policy when some definite occasion should arise. Rumours, however, which proved to be correct, went abroad that something of the nature of an eventual partition of European Turkey had been the object of negotiation. A Treaty had in fact been signed providing that if Russia should liberate Bulgaria by arms, Austria should enter into possession of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The neutrality of Austria had virtually been purchased at this price, and Russia had thus secured freedom of action in the event of the necessary reforms not being forced upon Turkey by the concert of Europe. Sooner perhaps than Prince Gortschakoff had expected, the religious enthusiasm of the Russian people and their sympathy for their kinsmen and fellow-believers beyond the Danube forced the Czar into vigorous action. In spite of the assistance of several thousands of Russian volunteers and of the leadership of the Russian General Tchernaieff, the Servians were defeated in their struggle with the Turks. The mediation of England was in vain tendered to the Porte on the only terms on which even at London peace was seen to be possible, the maintenance of the existing rights of Servia and the establishment of provincial autonomy in Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Bulgaria. After a brief suspension of hostilities in September war was renewed. The Servians were driven from their positions; Alexinatz was captured, the road to Belgrade lay open, and the doom of Bulgaria seemed likely to descend upon the conquered Principality. The Turks offered indeed a five months’ armistice, which would have saved them the risks of a winter campaign and enabled them to crush their enemy with accumulated forces in the following spring. This, by the advice of Russia, the Servians refused to accept. On the 30th of October a Russian ultimatum was handed in at Constantinople by the Ambassador Ignatieff, requiring within forty-eight hours the grant to Servia of an armistice for two months and the cessation of hostilities. The Porte submitted; and wherever Slav and Ottoman stood facing one another in arms, in Herzegovina and Bosnia as well as Servia and Montenegro, there was a pause in the struggle.

The imminence of a war between Russia and Turkey in the last days of October and the close connection between Russia and the Servian cause justified the anxiety of the British Government. This anxiety the Czar sought to dispel by a frank declaration of his own views. On the 2nd of November he entered into conversation with the British Ambassador, Lord A. Loftus, and assured him on his word of honour that he had no intention of acquiring Constantinople; that if it should be necessary for him to occupy part of Bulgaria his army would remain there only until peace was restored and the security of the Christian population established; and, generally, that he desired nothing more earnestly than a complete accord between England and Russia in the maintenance of European peace and the improvement of the condition of the Christian population in Turkey. He stated, however, with perfect clearness that if the Porte should continue to refuse the reforms demanded by Europe, and the Powers should put up with its continued refusal, Russia would act alone. Disclaiming in words of great earnestness all desire for territorial aggrandizement, he protested against the suspicion with which his policy was regarded in England, and desired that his words might be made public in England as a message of peace. Lord Derby, then Foreign Secretary, immediately expressed the satisfaction with which the Government had received these assurances; and on the following day an invitation was sent from London to all the European Powers proposing a Conference at Constantinople, on the basis of a common recognition of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, accompanied by a disavowal on the part of each of the Powers of all aims at aggrandizement or separate advantage. In proposing this Conference the Government acted in conformity with the expressed desire of the Czar. But there were two voices within the Cabinet. Lord Beaconsfield, had it been in his power, would have informed Russia categorically that England would support the Sultan if attacked. This the country and the Cabinet forbade: but the Premier had his own opportunities of utterance, and at the Guildhall Banquet on the 9th of November, six days after the Foreign Secretary had acknowledged the Czar's message of friendship, and before this message had been made known to the English people, Lord Beaconsfield uttered words which, if they were not idle bluster, could have been intended only as a menace to the Czar or as an appeal to the war-party at home:-"Though the policy of England is peace, there is no country so well prepared for war as our own. If England enters into conflict in a righteous cause, her resources are inexhaustible. She is not a country that when she enters into a campaign has to ask herself whether she can support a second or a third campaign. She enters into a campaign which she will not terminate till right is done."

The proposal made by the Earl of Derby for a Conference at Constantinople was accepted by all the Powers, and accepted on the bases specified. Lord Salisbury, then Secretary of State for India, was appointed to represent Great Britain in conjunction with Sir H. Elliot, its Ambassador. The Minister made his journey to Constantinople by way of the European capitals, and learnt at Berlin that the good understanding between the German Emperor and the Czar extended to Eastern affairs. Whether the British Government had as yet gained any trustworthy information on the Treaty of Reichstadt is doubtful; but so far as the public eye could judge, there was now, in spite of the tone assumed by Lord Beaconsfield, a fairer prospect of the solution of the Eastern question by the establishment of some form of autonomy in the Christian provinces than there had been at any previous time. The Porte itself recognised the serious intention of the Powers, and, in order to forestall the work of the Conference, prepared a scheme of constitutional reform that far surpassed the wildest claims of Herzegovinian or of Serb. Nothing less than a complete system of Parliamentary Government, with the very latest ingenuities from France and Belgium, was to be granted to the entire Ottoman Empire. That Midhat Pasha, who was the author of this scheme, may have had some serious end in view is not impossible; but with the mass of Palace-functionaries at Constantinople it was simply a device for embarrassing the West with its own inventions; and the action of men in power, both great and small, continued after the constitution had come into nominal existence to be exactly what it had been before. The very terms of the constitution must have been unintelligible to all but those who had been employed at foreign courts. The Government might as well have announced its intention of clothing the Balkans with the flora of the deep sea.

In the second week of December the representatives of the six Great Powers assembled at Constantinople. In order that the demands of Europe should be presented to the Porte with unanimity, they determined to hold a series of preliminary meetings with one another before the formal opening of the Conference and before communicating with the Turks. At these meetings, after Ignatieff had withdrawn his proposal for a Russian occupation of Bulgaria, complete accord was attained. It was resolved to demand the cession of certain small districts by the Porte to Servia and Montenegro; the grant of administrative autonomy to Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Bulgaria; the appointment in each of these provinces of Christian governors, whose terms of office should be for five years, and whose nomination should be subject to the approval of the Powers; the confinement of Turkish troops to the fortresses; the removal of the bands of Circassians to Asia; and finally the execution of these reforms under the superintendence of an International Commission, which should have at its disposal a corps of six thousand gendarmes to be enlisted in Switzerland or Belgium. By these arrangements, while the Sultan retained his sovereignty and the integrity of the Ottoman Empire remained unimpaired, it was conceived that the Christian population would be effectively secured against Turkish violence and caprice.

All differences between the representatives of the European Powers having been removed, the formal Conference was opened on the 23rd of December under the presidency of the Turkish Foreign Minister, Savfet Pasha. The proceedings had not gone far when they were interrupted by the roar of cannon. Savfet explained that the new Ottoman constitution was being promulgated, and that the salvo which the members of the Conference heard announced the birth of an era of universal happiness and prosperity in the Sultan's dominions. It soon appeared that in the presence of this great panacea there was no place for the reforming efforts of the Christian Powers. Savfet declared from the first that, whatever concessions might be made on other points, the Sultan's Government would never consent to the establishment of a Foreign Commission to superintend the execution of its reforms, nor to the joint action of the Powers in the appointment of the governors of its provinces. It was in vain argued that without such foreign control Europe possessed no guarantee that the promises and the good intentions of the Porte, however gratifying these might be, would be carried into effect. Savfet replied that by the Treaty of 1856 the Powers had declared the Ottoman Empire to stand on exactly the same footing as any other great State in Europe, and had expressly debarred themselves from interfering, under whatever circumstances, with its internal administration. The position of the Turkish representative at the Conference was in fact the only logical one. In the Treaty of Paris the Powers had elaborately pledged themselves to an absurdity; and this Treaty the Turk was never weary of throwing in their faces. But the situation was not one for lawyers and for the interpretation of documents. The Conference, after hearing the arguments and the counter-projects of the Turkish Ministers, after reconsidering its own demands and modifying these in many important points in deference to Ottoman wishes, adhered to the demand for a Foreign Commission and for a European control over the appointment of governors. Midhat, who was now Grand Vizier, summoned the Great Council of the Empire, and presented to it the demands of the Conference. These demands the Great Council unanimously rejected. Lord Salisbury had already warned the Sultan what would be the results of continued obstinacy; and after receiving Midhat’s final reply the ambassadors of all the Powers, together with the envoys who had been specially appointed for the Conference, quitted Constantinople.

Russia, since the beginning of November, had been actively preparing for war. The Czar had left the world in no doubt as to his own intentions in case of the failure of the European Concert; it only remained for him to ascertain whether, after the settlement of a definite scheme of reform by the Conference and the rejection of this scheme by the Porte, the Powers would or would not take steps to enforce their conclusion. England suggested that the Sultan should be allowed a year to carry out his good intentions: Gortschakoff inquired whether England would pledge itself to action if, at the end of the year, reform was not effected; but no such pledge was forthcoming. With the object either of discovering some arrangement in which the Powers would combine, or of delaying the outbreak of war until the Russian preparations were more advanced and the season more favourable, Ignatieff was sent round to all the European Courts. He visited England, and subsequently drew up, with the assistance of Count Schouvaloff, Russian Ambassador at London, a document which gained the approval of the British as well as the Continental Governments. This document, known as the London Protocol, was signed on the 31st of March. After a reference to the promises of reform made by the Porte, it stated that the Powers intended to watch carefully by their representatives over the manner in which these promises were carried into effect; that if their hopes should be once more disappointed they should regard the condition of affairs as incompatible with the interests of Europe; and that in such case they would decide in common upon the means best fitted to secure the well-being of the Christian population and the interests of general peace. Declarations relative to the disarmament of Russia, which it was now the principal object of the British Government to effect, were added. There was indeed so little of a substantial engagement in this Protocol that it would have been surprising had Russia disarmed without obtaining some further guarantee for the execution of reform. But weak as the Protocol was, it was rejected by the Porte. Once more the appeal was made to the Treaty of Paris, once more the Sultan protested against the encroachment of the Powers on his own inviolable rights. Lord Beaconsfield's Cabinet even now denied that the last word had been spoken, and professed to entertain some hope in the effect of subsequent diplomatic steps; but the rest of Europe asked and expected no further forbearance on the part of Russia. The army of operations already lay on the Pruth: the Grand Duke Nicholas, brother of the Czar, was appointed to its command; and on the 24th of April the Russian Government issued its declaration of war.

Between the Russian frontier and the Danube lay the Principality of Roumania. A convention signed before the outbreak of hostilities gave to the Russian army a free passage through this territory, and Roumania subsequently entered the war as Russia's ally. It was not, however, until the fourth week of June that the invaders were able to cross the Danube. Seven army-corps were assembled in Roumania; of these one crossed the Lower Danube into the Dobrudscha, two were retained in Roumania as a reserve, and four crossed the river in the neighbourhood of Sistowa, in order to enter upon the Bulgarian campaign. It was the desire of the Russians to throw forward the central part of their army by the line of the river Jantra upon the Balkans; with their left to move against Rustchuk and the Turkish armies in the eastern fortresses of Bulgaria; with their right to capture Nicopolis, and guard the central column against any flank attack from the west. But both in Europe and in Asia the Russians had underrated the power of their adversary, and entered upon the war with insufficient forces. Advantages won by their generals on the Armenian frontier while the European army was still marching through Roumania were lost in the course of the next few weeks. Bayazid and other places that fell into the hands of the Russians at the first onset were recovered by the Turks under Mukhtar Pasha; and within a few days after the opening of the European campaign the Russian divisions in Asia were everywhere retreating upon their own frontier. The Bulgarian campaign was marked by the same rapid successes of the invader at the outset, to be followed, owing to the same insufficiency of force, by similar disasters. Encountering no effective opposition on the Danube, the Russians pushed forward rapidly towards the Balkans by the line of the Jantra. The Turkish army lay scattered in the Bulgarian fortresses, from Widdin in the extreme west to Shumla at the foot of the Eastern Balkans. It was considered by the Russian commanders that two army-corps would be required to operate against the Turks in Eastern Bulgaria, while one corps would be enough to cover the central line of invasion from the west. There remained, excluding the two corps in reserve in Roumania and the corps holding the Dobrudscha, but one corps for the march on the Balkans and Adrianople. The command of the vanguard of this body was given to General Gourko, who pressed on into the Balkans, seized the Shipka Pass, and descended into Southern Bulgaria (July 15). The Turks were driven from Kesanlik and Eski Sagra, and Gourko’s cavalry, a few hundreds in number, advanced to within two days' march of Adrianople.

The headquarters of the whole Russian army were now at Tirnova, the ancient Bulgarian capital, about half-way between the Danube and the Balkans. Two army-corps, commanded by the Czarewitch, moved eastwards against Rustchuk and the so-called Turkish army of the Danube, which was gathering behind the lines of the Kara Lom; another division, under General Krudener, turned westward and captured Nicopolis with its garrison. Lovatz and other points lying westward of the Jantra were occupied by weak detachments; but so badly were the reconnaissances of the Russians performed in this direction that they were unaware of the approach of a Turkish army from Widdin, thirty-five thousand strong, till this was close on their flank. Before the Russians could prevent him, Osman Pasha, with the vanguard of this army, had occupied the town and heights of Plevna, between Nicopolis and Lovatz. On the 20th of July, still unaware of their enemy's strength, the Russians attacked him at Plevna: they were defeated with considerable loss, and after a few days one of Osman's divisions, pushing forward upon the invader's central line, drove them out of Lovatz. The Grand Duke now sent reinforcements to Krudener, and ordered him to take Plevna at all costs. Krudener's strength was raised to thirty-five thousand; but in the meantime new Turkish regiments had joined Osman, and his troops, now numbering about fifty thousand, had been working day and night entrenching themselves in the heights round Plevna which the Russians had to attack. The assault was made on the 30th of July; it was beaten back with terrible slaughter, the Russians leaving a fifth of their number on the field. Had Osman taken up the offensive and the Turkish commander on the Lom pressed vigorously upon the invader's line, it would probably have gone ill with the Russian army in Bulgaria. Gourko was at once compelled to abandon the country south of the Balkans. His troops, falling back upon the Shipka Pass, were there attacked from the south by far superior forces under Suleiman Pasha. The Ottoman commander, prodigal of the lives of his men and trusting to mere blindfold violence, hurled his army day after day against the Russian positions (Aug. 20-23). There was a moment when all seemed lost, and the Russian soldiers sent to their Czar the last message of devotion from men who were about to die at their post. But in the extremity of peril there arrived a reinforcement, weak, but sufficient to turn the scale against the ill-commanded Turks. Suleiman's army withdrew to the village of Shipka at the southern end of the pass. The pass itself, with the entrance from northern Bulgaria, remained in the hands of the Russians.

After the second battle of Plevna it became clear that the Russians could not carry on the campaign with their existing forces. Two army-corps were called up which were guarding the coast of the Black Sea; several others were mobilised in the interior of Russia, and began their journey towards the Danube. So urgent, however, was the immediate need, that the Czar was compelled to ask help from Roumania. This help was given. Roumanian troops, excellent in quality, filled up the gap caused by Krudener's defeats, and the whole army before Plevna was placed under the command of the Roumanian Prince Charles. At the beginning of September the Russians were again ready for action. Lovatz was wrested from the Turks, and the division which had captured it moved on to Plevna to take part in a great combined attack. This attack was made on the 11th of September under the eyes of the Czar. On the north the Russians and Roumanians together, after a desperate struggle, stormed the Grivitza redoubt. On the south Skobeleff carried the first Turkish position, but could make no impression on their second line of defence. Twelve thousand men fell on the Russian side before the day was over, and the main defences of the Turks were still unbroken. On the morrow the Turks took up the offensive. Skobeleff, exposed to the attack of a far superior foe, prayed in vain for reinforcements. His men, standing in the positions that they had won from the Turks, repelled one onslaught after another, but were ultimately overwhelmed and driven from the field. At the close of the second day's battle the Russians were everywhere beaten back within their own lines, except at the Grivitza redoubt, which was itself but an outwork of the Turkish defences, and faced by more formidable works within. The assailants had sustained a loss approaching that of the Germans at Gravelotte with an army one-third of the Germans' strength. Osman was stronger than at the beginning of the campaign; with what sacrifices Russia would have to purchase its ultimate victory no man could calculate.

The three defeats at Plevna cast a sinister light upon the Russian military administration and the quality of its chiefs. The soldiers had fought heroically; divisional generals like Skobeleff had done all that man could do in such positions; the faults were those of the headquarters and the officers by whom the Imperial Family were surrounded. After the third catastrophe, public opinion called for the removal of the authors of these disasters and the employment of abler men. Todleben, the defender of Sebastopol, who for some unknown reason had been left without a command, was now summoned to Bulgaria, and virtually placed at the head of the army before Plevna. He saw that the stronghold of Osman could only be reduced by a regular siege, and prepared to draw his lines right round it. For a time Osman kept open his communications with the south-west, and heavy trains of ammunition and supplies made their way into Plevna from this direction; but the investment was at length completed, and the army of Plevna cut off from the world. In the meantime new regiments were steadily pouring into Bulgaria from the interior of Russia. East of the Jantra, after many alternations of fortune, the Turks were finally driven back behind the river Lom. The last efforts of Suleiman failed to wrest the Shipka Pass from its defenders. From the narrow line which the invaders had with such difficulty held during three anxious months their forces, accumulating day by day, spread out south and west up to the slopes of the Balkans, ready to burst over the mountain-barrier and sweep the enemy back to the walls of Constantinople when once Plevna should have fallen and the army which besieged it should be added to the invader's strength. At length, in the second week of December, Osman's supply of food was exhausted. Victor in three battles, he refused to surrender without one more struggle. On the 10th of December, after distributing among his men what there remained of provisions, he made a desperate effort to break out towards the west. His columns dashed in vain against the besieger's lines; behind him his enemies pressed forward into the positions which he had abandoned; a ring of fire like that of Sedan surrounded the Turkish army; and after thousands had fallen in a hopeless conflict, the general and the troops who for five months had held in check the collected forces of the Russian Empire surrendered to their conqueror.

If in the first stages of the war there was little that did credit to Russia’s military capacity, the energy that marked its close made amends for what had gone before. Winter was descending in extreme severity: the Balkans were a mass of snow and ice; but no obstacle could now bar the invader’s march. Gourko, in command of an army that had gathered to the south-west of Plevna, made his way through the mountains above Etropol in the last days of December, and, driving the Turks from Sophia, pressed on towards Philippopolis and Adrianople. Farther east two columns crossed the Balkans by bye-paths right and left of the Shipka Pass, and then, converging on Shipka itself, fell upon the rear of the Turkish army which still blocked the southern outlet. Simultaneously a third corps marched down the pass from the north and assailed the Turks in front. After a fierce struggle the entire Turkish army, thirty- five thousand strong, laid down its arms. There now remained only one considerable force between the invaders and Constantinople. This body, which was commanded by Suleiman, held the road which runs along the valley of the Maritza, at a point somewhat to the east of Philippopolis. Against it Gourko advanced from the west, while the victors of Shipka, descending due south through Kesanlik, barred the line of retreat towards Adrianople. The last encounter of the war took place on the 17th of January. Suleiman's army, routed and demoralised, succeeded in making its escape to the Aegean coast. Pursuit was unnecessary, for the war was now practically over. On the 20th of January the Russians made their entry into Adrianople; in the next few days their advanced guard touched the Sea of Marmora at Rodosto.

Immediately after the fall of Plevna the Porte had applied to the European Powers for their mediation. Disasters in Asia had already warned it not to delay submission too long; for in the middle of October Mukhtar Pasha had been driven from his positions, and a month later Kars had been taken by storm. The Russians had subsequently penetrated into Armenia and had captured the outworks of Erzurum. Each day that now passed brought the Ottoman Empire nearer to destruction. Servia again declared war; the Montenegrins made themselves masters of the coast-towns and of border-territory north and south; Greece seemed likely to enter into the struggle. Baffled in his attempt to gain the common mediation of the Powers, the Sultan appealed to the Queen of England personally for her good offices in bringing the conflict to a close. In reply to a telegram from London, the Czar declared himself willing to treat for peace as soon as direct communications should be addressed to his representatives by the Porte. On the 14th of January commissioners were sent to the headquarters of the Grand Duke Nicholas at Kesanlik to treat for an armistice and for preliminaries of peace. The Russians, now in the full tide of victory, were in no hurry to agree with their adversary. Nicholas bade the Turkish envoys accompany him to Adrianople, and it was not until the 31st of January that the armistice was granted and the preliminaries of peace signed.

While the Turkish envoys were on their journey to the Russian headquarters, the session of Parliament opened at London. The Ministry had declared at the outbreak of the war that Great Britain would remain neutral unless its own interests should be imperilled, and it had defined these interests with due clearness both in its communications with the Russian Ambassador and in its statements in Parliament. It was laid down that Her Majesty's Government could not permit the blockade of the Suez Canal, or the extension of military operations to Egypt; that it could not witness with indifference the passing of Constantinople into other hands than those of its present possessors; and that it would entertain serious objections to any material alterations in the rules made under European sanction for the navigation of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. In reply to Lord Derby's note which formulated these conditions of neutrality Prince Gortschakoff had repeated the Czar's assurance that the acquisition of Constantinople was excluded from his views, and had promised to undertake no military operation in Egypt; he had, however, let it be understood that, as an incident of warfare, the reduction of Constantinople might be necessary like that of any other capital. In the Queen's speech at the opening of Parliament, Ministers stated that the conditions on which the neutrality of England was founded had not hitherto been infringed by either belligerent, but that, should hostilities be prolonged, some unexpected occurrence might render it necessary to adopt measures of precaution, measures which could not be adequately prepared without an appeal to the liberality of Parliament. From language subsequently used by Lord Beaconsfield's colleagues, it would appear that the Cabinet had some apprehension that the Russian army, escaping from the Czar's control, might seize and attempt permanently to hold Constantinople. On the 23rd of January orders were sent to Admiral Hornby, commander of the fleet at Besika Bay, to pass the Dardanelles, and proceed to Constantinople. Lord Derby, who saw no necessity for measures of a warlike character until the result of the negotiations at Adrianople should become known, now resigned office; but on the reversal of the order to Admiral Hornby he rejoined the Cabinet. On the 28th of January, after the bases of peace had been communicated by Count Schouvaloff to the British Government but before they had been actually signed, the Chancellor of the Exchequer moved for a vote of £6,000,000 for increasing the armaments of the country. This vote was at first vigorously opposed on the ground that none of the stated conditions of England's neutrality had been infringed, and that in the conditions of peace between Russia and Turkey there was nothing that justified a departure from the policy which England had hitherto pursued. In the course of the debates, however, a telegram arrived from Mr. Layard, Elliot's successor at Constantinople, stating that notwithstanding the armistice the Russians were pushing on towards the capital; that the Turks had been compelled to evacuate Silivria on the Sea of Marmora; that the Russian general was about to occupy Tchataldja, an outpost of the last line of defence not thirty miles from Constantinople; and that the Porte was in great alarm, and unable to understand the Russian proceedings. The utmost excitement was caused at Westminster by this telegram. The fleet was at once ordered to Constantinople. Mr. Forster, who had led the opposition to the vote of credit, sought to withdraw his amendment; and although on the following day, with the arrival of the articles of the armistice, it appeared that the Russians were simply moving up to the accepted line of demarcation, and that the Porte could hardly have been ignorant of this when Layard's telegram was dispatched, the alarm raised in London did not subside, and the vote of credit was carried by a majority of above two hundred.

When a victorious army is, without the intervention of some external Power, checked in its work of conquest by the negotiation of an armistice, it is invariably made a condition that positions shall be handed over to it which it does not at the moment occupy, but which it might reasonably expect to have conquered within a certain date, had hostilities not been suspended. The armistice granted to Austria by Napoleon after the battle of Marengo involved the evacuation of the whole of Upper Italy; the armistice which Bismarck offered to the French Government of Defence at the beginning of the siege of Paris would have involved the surrender of Strasburg and of Toul. In demanding that the line of demarcation should be carried almost up to the walls of Constantinople the Russians were asking for no more than would certainly have been within their hands had hostilities been prolonged for a few weeks, or even days. Deeply as the conditions of the armistice agitated the English people, it was not in these conditions, but in the conditions of the peace which was to follow, that the true cause of contention between England and Russia, if cause there was, had to be found. Nevertheless, the approach of the Russians to Gallipoli and the lines of Tchataldja, followed, as it was, by the despatch of the British fleet to Constantinople, brought Russia and Great Britain within a hair's breadth of war. It was in vain that Lord Derby described the fleet as sent only for the protection of the lives and property of British subjects. Gortschakoff, who was superior in amenities of this kind, replied that the Russian Government had exactly the same end in view, with the distinction that its protection would be extended to all Christians. Should the British fleet appear at the Bosphorus, Russian troops would, in the fulfilment of a common duty of humanity, enter Constantinople. Yielding to this threat, Lord Beaconsfield bade the fleet halt at a convenient point in the Sea of Marmora. On both sides preparations were made for immediate action. The guns on our ships stood charged for battle; the Russians strewed the shallows with torpedoes. Had a Russian soldier appeared on the heights of Gallipoli, had an Englishman landed on the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus, war would at once have broken out. But after some weeks of extreme danger the perils of mere contiguity passed away, and the decision between peace and war was transferred from the accidents of tent and quarter deck to the deliberations of statesmen assembled in Congress.

The bases of Peace which were made the condition of the armistice granted at Adrianople formed with little alteration the substance of the Treaty signed by Russia and Turkey at San Stefano, a village on the Sea of Marmora, on the 3rd of March. By this Treaty the Porte recognised the independence of Servia, Montenegro, and Roumania, and made considerable cessions of territory to the two former States. Bulgaria was constituted an autonomous tributary Principality, with a Christian Government and a national militia. Its frontier, which was made so extensive as to include the greater part of European Turkey, was defined as beginning near Midia on the Black Sea, not sixty miles from the Bosphorus; passing thence westwards just to the north of Adrianople; descending to the Aegean Sea, and following the coast as far as the Thracian Chersonese; then passing inland westwards, so as barely to exclude Salonika; running on to the border of Albania within fifty miles of the Adriatic, and from this point following the Albanian border up to the new Servian frontier. The Prince of Bulgaria was to be freely elected by the population, and confirmed by the Porte with the assent of the Powers; a system of administration was to be drawn up by an Assembly of Bulgarian notables; and the introduction of the new system into Bulgaria with the superintendence of its working was to be entrusted for two years to a Russian Commissioner. Until the native militia was organized, Russian troops, not exceeding fifty thousand in number, were to occupy the country; this occupation, however, was to be limited to a term approximating to two years. In Bosnia and Herzegovina the proposals laid before the Porte at the first sitting of the Conference of 1876 were to be immediately introduced, subject to such modifications as might be agreed upon between Turkey, Russia, and Austria. The Porte undertook to apply scrupulously in Crete the Organic Law which had been drawn up in 1868, taking into account the previously expressed wishes of the native population. An analogous law, adapted to local requirements, was, after being communicated to the Czar, to be introduced into Epirus, Thessaly, and the other parts of Turkey in Europe for which a special constitution was not provided by the Treaty. Commissions, in which the native population was to be largely represented, were in each province to be entrusted with the task of elaborating the details of the new organisation. In Armenia the Sultan undertook to carry into effect without further delay the improvements and reforms demanded by local requirements, and to guarantee the security of the Armenians from Kurds and Circassians. As an indemnity for the losses and expenses of the war the Porte admitted itself to be indebted to Russia in the sum of fourteen hundred million roubles; but in accordance with the wishes of the Sultan, and in consideration of the financial embarrassments of Turkey, the Czar consented to accept in substitution for the greater part of this sum the cession of the Dobrudscha in Europe, and of the districts of Ardahan, Kars, Batoum, and Bayazid in Asia. As to the balance of three hundred million roubles left due to Russia, the mode of payment or guarantee was to be settled by an understanding between the two Governments. The Dobrudscha was to be given by the Czar to Roumania in exchange for Bessarabia, which this State was to transfer to Russia. The complete evacuation of Turkey in Europe was to take place within three months, that of Turkey in Asia within six months, from the conclusion of peace.

It had from the first been admitted by the Russian Government that questions affecting the interests of Europe at large could not be settled by a Treaty between Russia and Turkey alone, but must form the subject of European agreement. Early in February the Emperor of Austria had proposed that a European Conference should assemble at his own capital. It was subsequently agreed that Berlin, instead of Vienna, should be the place of meeting, and instead of a Conference a Congress should be held, that is, an international assembly of the most solemn form, in which each of the Powers is represented not merely by an ambassador or an envoy, but by its leading Ministers. But the question at once arose whether there existed in the mind of the Russian Government a distinction between parts of the Treaty of San Stefano bearing on the interests of Europe generally and parts which affected no States but Russia and Turkey; and whether, in this case, Russia was willing that Europe should be the judge of the distinction, or, on the contrary, claimed for itself the right of withholding portions of the Treaty from the cognisance of the European Court. In accepting the principle of a Congress, Lord Derby on behalf of Great Britain made it a condition that every article of the Treaty without exception should be laid before the Congress, not necessarily as requiring the concurrence of the Powers, but in order that the Powers themselves might in each case decide whether their concurrence was necessary or not. To this demand Prince Gortschakoff offered the most strenuous resistance, claiming for Russia the liberty of accepting, or not accepting, the discussion of any question that might be raised. It would clearly have been in the power of the Russian Government, had this condition been granted, to exclude from the consideration of Europe precisely those matters which in the opinion of other States were most essentially of European import. Phrases of conciliation were suggested; but no ingenuity of language could shade over the difference of purpose which separated the rival Powers. Every day the chances of the meeting of the Congress seemed to be diminishing, the approach of war between Russia and Great Britain more unmistakable. Lord Beaconsfield called out the Reserves and summoned troops from India; even the project of seizing a port in Asia Minor in case the Sultan should fall under Russian influence was discussed in the Cabinet. Unable to reconcile himself to these vigorous measures, Lord Derby, who had long been at variance with the Premier, now finally withdrew from the Cabinet (March 28). He was succeeded in his office by the Marquis of Salisbury, whose comparison of his relative and predecessor to Titus Oates revived the interest of the diplomatic world in a now forgotten period of English history.

The new Foreign Secretary had not been many days in office when a Circular, despatched to all the Foreign Courts, summed up the objections of Great Britain to the Treaty of San Stefano. It was pointed out that a strong Slavic State would be created under the control of Russia, possessing important harbours upon the shores of the Black Sea and the Archipelago, and giving to Russia a preponderating influence over political and commercial relations on both those seas; that a large Greek population would be merged in a dominant Slavic majority; that by the extension of Bulgaria to the Archipelago the Albanian and Greek provinces left to the Sultan would be severed from Constantinople; that the annexation of Bessarabia and of Batoum would make the will of the Russian Government dominant over all the vicinity of the Black Sea; that the acquisition of the strongholds of Armenia would place the population of that province under the immediate influence of the Power that held these strongholds, while through the cession of Bayazid the European trade from Trebizond to Persia would become liable to be arrested by the prohibitory barriers of the Russian commercial system. Finally, by the stipulation for an indemnity which it was beyond the power of Turkey to discharge, and by the reference of the mode of payment or guarantee to a later settlement, Russia had placed it in its power either to extort yet larger cessions of territory, or to force Turkey into engagements subordinating its policy in all things to that of St. Petersburg.

It was the object of Lord Salisbury to show that the effects of the Treaty of San Stefano, taken in a mass, threatened the peace and the interests of Europe, and therefore, whatever might be advanced for or against individual stipulations of the Treaty, that the Treaty as a whole, and not clauses selected by one Power, must be submitted to the Congress if the examination was not to prove illusory. This was a just line of argument. Nevertheless it was natural to suppose that some parts of the Treaty must be more distasteful than others to Great Britain; and Count Schouvaloff, who was sincerely desirous of peace, applied himself to the task of discovering with what concessions Lord Beaconsfield's Cabinet would be satisfied. He found that if Russia would consent to modifications of the Treaty in Congress excluding Bulgaria from the Aegean Sea, reducing its area on the south and west, dividing it into two provinces, and restoring the Balkans to the Sultan as a military frontier, giving back Bayazid to the Turks, and granting to other Powers besides Russia a voice in the organisation of Epirus, Thessaly, and the other Christian provinces of the Porte, England might be induced to accept without essential change the other provisions of San Stefano. On the 7th of May Count Schouvaloff quitted London for St. Petersburg, in order to lay before the Czar the results of his communications with the Cabinet, and to acquaint him with the state of public opinion in England. On his journey hung the issues of peace or war. Backed by the counsels of the German Emperor, Schouvaloff succeeded in his mission. The Czar determined not to risk the great results already secured by insisting on the points contested, and Schouvaloff returned to London authorised to conclude a pact with the British Government on the general basis which had been laid down. On the 30th of May a secret agreement, in which the above were the principal points, was signed, and the meeting of the Congress for the examination of the entire Treaty of San Stefano was now assured. But it was not without the deepest anxiety and regret that Lord Beaconsfield consented to the annexation of Batoum and the Armenian fortresses. He obtained indeed an assurance in the secret agreement with Schouvaloff that the Russian frontier should be no more extended on the side of Turkey in Asia; but his policy did not stop short here. By a Convention made with the Sultan on the 4th of June, Great Britain engaged, in the event of any further aggression by Russia upon the Asiatic territories of the Sultan, to defend these territories by force of arms. The Sultan in return promised to introduce the necessary reforms, to be agreed upon by the two Powers, for the protection of the Christian and other subjects of the Porte in these territories, and further assigned the Island of Cyprus to be occupied and administered by England. It was stipulated by a humorous after-clause that if Russia should restore to Turkey its Armenian conquests, Cyprus would be evacuated by England, and the Convention itself should be at an end.

The Congress of Berlin, at which the Premier himself and Lord Salisbury represented Great Britain, opened on the 13th of June. Though the compromise between England and Russia had been settled in general terms, the arrangement of details opened such a series of difficulties that the Congress seemed more than once on the point of breaking up. It was mainly due to the perseverance and wisdom of Prince Bismarck, who transferred the discussion of the most crucial points from the Congress to private meetings of his guests, and who himself acted as conciliator when Gortschakoff folded up his maps or Lord Beaconsfield ordered a special train, that the work was at length achieved. The Treaty of Berlin, signed on the 13th of July, confined Bulgaria, as an autonomous Principality, to the country north of the Balkans, and diminished the authority which, pending the establishment of its definitive system of government, would by the Treaty of San Stefano have belonged to a Russian commissioner. The portion of Bulgaria south of the Balkans, but extending no farther west than the valley of the Maritza, and no farther south than Mount Rhodope, was formed into a Province of East Roumelia, to remain subject to the direct political and military authority of the Sultan, under conditions of administrative autonomy. The Sultan was declared to possess the right of erecting fortifications both on the coast and on the land-frontier of this province, and of maintaining troops there. Alike in Bulgaria and in Eastern Roumelia the period of occupation by Russian troops was limited to nine months. Bosnia and Herzegovina were handed over to Austria, to be occupied and administered by that Power. The cessions of territory made to Servia and Montenegro in the Treaty of San Stefano were modified with the object of interposing a broader strip between these two States; Bayazid was omitted from the ceded districts in Asia, and the Czar declared it his intention to erect Batoum into a free port, essentially commercial. At the instance of France the provisions relating to the Greek Provinces of Turkey were superseded by a vote in favour of the cession of part of these Provinces to the Hellenic Kingdom. The Sultan was recommended to cede Thessaly and part of Epirus to Greece, the Powers reserving to themselves the right of offering their mediation to facilitate the negotiations. In other respects the provisions of the Treaty of San Stefano were confirmed without substantial change.

Lord Beaconsfield returned to London, bringing, as he said, peace with honour. It was claimed, in the despatch to our Ambassadors which accompanied the publication of the Treaty of Berlin, that in this Treaty the cardinal objections raised by the British Government to the Treaty of San Stefano had found an entire remedy. "Bulgaria," wrote Lord Salisbury, "is now confined to the river-barrier of the Danube, and consequently has not only ceased to possess any harbour on the Archipelago, but is removed by more than a hundred miles from the neighbourhood of that sea. On the Euxine the important port of Bourgas has been restored to the Government of Turkey; and Bulgaria retains less than half the sea-board originally assigned to it, and possesses no other port except the roadstead of Varna, which can hardly be used for any but commercial purposes. The replacement under Turkish rule of Bourgas and the southern half of the sea-board on the Euxine, and the strictly commercial character assigned to Batoum, have largely obviated the menace to the liberty of the Black Sea. The political outposts of Russian power have been pushed back to the region beyond the Balkans; the Sultan's dominions have been provided with a defensible frontier." It was in short the contention of the English Government that while Russia, in the pretended emancipation of a great part of European Turkey by the Treaty of San Stefano, had but acquired a new dependency, England, by insisting on the division of Bulgaria, had baffled this plan and restored to Turkey an effective military dominion over all the country south of the Balkans. That Lord Beaconsfield did well in severing Macedonia from the Slavic State of Bulgaria there is little reason to doubt; that, having so severed it, he did ill in leaving it without a European guarantee for good government, every successive year made more plain; the wisdom of his treatment of Bulgaria itself must, in the light of subsequent events, remain matter for controversy. It may fairly be said that in dealing with Bulgaria English statesmen were, on the whole, dealing with the unknown. Nevertheless, had guidance been accepted from the history of the other Balkan States, analogies were not altogether wanting or altogether remote. During the present century three Christian States had been formed out of what had been Ottoman territory: Servia, Greece, and Roumania. Not one of these had become a Russian Province, or had failed to develop and maintain a distinct national existence. In Servia an attempt had been made to retain for the Porte the right of keeping troops in garrison. This attempt had proved a mistake. So long as the right was exercised it had simply been a source of danger and disquiet, and it had finally been abandoned by the Porte itself. In the case of Greece, Russia, with a view to its own interests, had originally proposed that the country should be divided into four autonomous provinces tributary to the Sultan: against this the Greeks had protested, and Canning had successfully supported their protest. Even the appointment of an ex-Minister of St. Petersburg, Capodistrias, as first President of Greece in 1827 had failed to bring the liberated country under Russian influence; and in the course of the half-century which had since elapsed it had become one of the commonplaces of politics, accepted by every school in every country of Western Europe, that the Powers had committed a great error in 1833 in not extending to far larger dimensions the Greek Kingdom which they then established. In the case of Roumania, the British Government had, out of fear of Russia, insisted in 1856 that the provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia should remain separate: the result was that the inhabitants in defiance of England effected their union, and that after a few years had passed there was not a single politician in England who regarded their union otherwise than with satisfaction. If history taught anything in the solution of the Eastern question, it taught that the effort to reserve for the Sultan a military existence in countries which had passed from under his general control was futile, and that the best barrier against Russian influence was to be found not in the division but in the strengthening and consolidation of the States rescued from Ottoman dominions.

It was of course open to English statesmen in 1878 to believe that all that had hitherto passed in the Balkan Peninsula had no bearing upon the problems of the hour, and that, whatever might have been the case with Greece, Servia, and Roumania, Bulgaria stood on a completely different footing, and called for the application of principles not based on the experience of the past but on the divinations of superior minds. Should the history of succeeding years bear out this view, should the Balkans become a true military frontier for Turkey, should Northern Bulgaria sink to the condition of a Russian dependency, and Eastern Roumelia, in severance from its enslaved kin, abandon itself to a thriving ease behind the garrisons of the reforming Ottoman, Lord Beaconsfield will have deserved the fame of a statesman whose intuitions, undimmed by the mists of experience, penetrated the secret of the future, and shaped, because they discerned, the destiny of nations. It will be the task of later historians to measure the exact period after the Congress of Berlin at which the process indicated by Lord Beaconsfield came into visible operation; it is the misfortune of those whose view is limited by a single decade to have to record that in every particular, with the single exception of the severance of Macedonia from the Slavonic Principality, Lord Beaconsfield's ideas, purposes and anticipations, in so far as they related to Eastern Europe, have hitherto been contradicted by events. What happened in Greece, Servia, and Roumania has happened in Bulgaria. Experience, thrown to the winds by English Ministers in 1878, has justified those who listened to its voice. There exists no such thing as a Turkish fortress on the Balkans; Bourgas no more belongs to the Sultan than Athens or Belgrade; no Turkish soldier has been able to set foot within the territory whose very name, Eastern Roumelia, was to stamp it as Turkish dominion. National independence, a living force in Greece, in Servia, in Roumania, has proved its power in Bulgaria too. The efforts of Russia to establish its influence over a people liberated by its arms have been repelled with unexpected firmness. Like the divided members of Roumania, the divided members of Bulgaria have effected their union. In this union, in the growing material and moral force of the Bulgarian State, Western Europe sees a power wholly favourable to its own hopes for the future of the East, wholly adverse to the extension of Russian rule: and it has been reserved for Lord Beaconsfield's colleague at the Congress of Berlin, regardless of the fact that Bulgaria north of the Balkans, not the southern Province, created that vigorous military and political organisation which was the precursor of national union, to explain that in dividing Bulgaria into two portions the English Ministers of 1878 intended to promote its ultimate unity, and that in subjecting the southern half to the Sultan's rule they laid the foundation for its ultimate independence.

END