The greatest speech John Bright ever made was against the Crimean War. “That terrible oppression, that multitudinous crime which we call the Ottoman Empire,” was his description of the country which Palmerston so greatly admired. Richard Cobden had studied conditions at first hand and had reached a conclusion identically the same as that of my friend whom I have already quoted—that is, that Turkey was not reformable. He ridiculed the fear that everywhere prevailed against Russia, denied that Russia’s prosperity as a nation necessarily endangered Great Britain, declared that the Turkish Empire could not be maintained, and that, even though it could be, it was not worth preserving.
“You must address yourselves,” said Cobden, “as men of sense and men of energy to the question—What are you to do with the Christian population? For Mohammedanism cannot be maintained, and I should be sorry to see this country fighting for the maintenance of Mohammedanism.... You may keep Turkey on the map of Europe, you may call the country by the name of Turkey if you like, but do not think that you can keep up the Mohammedan rule in the country.”
These were about the mightiest voices in England at that time, but even Cobden and Bright were wildly abused for maintaining that the Eastern question was primarily a problem in ethics. In order to preserve this hideous anachronism England fought a bloody and disastrous war. I presume most Englishmen to-day regard the Crimean War as about the most wicked and futile in their national existence. When the whole thing was over, a witty Frenchman summed up the performance by saying: “If we read the treaty of peace, there are no visible signs to show who were the conquerors and who the vanquished.” There was only one power which could view the results with much satisfaction; that was Turkey. The Treaty of Paris specifically guaranteed her independence and integrity. It shut the Black Sea to naval vessels, thus protecting Turkey from attack by Russia. Worst of all, it left the Sultan’s Christian subjects absolutely in his power.
The Sultan did, indeed, promise reforms—but he merely promised them. Despite experience to the contrary, the British and French diplomats blandly accepted this promise as equivalent to performance. It is painful to look back to this year 1856; to realize that France and England, having defeated Russia, had a free hand to solve the Ottoman problem, and that they refrained from doing so. That absurd prepossession that this oriental empire must be preserved in Europe simply as a buffer state against the progress of Russia entirely controlled the minds of British statesmen—and millions of Christian people were left to their fate.
What that fate was we all know. The Sultan’s promises of reform, never made in good faith, were immediately disregarded. Pillage, massacre, and lust continued to be the chief instruments used by the Sublime Porte in governing its subject peoples. Again the Sultan maintained his throne by playing off one European power against another. The “settlement” of the Eastern problem which had been provided by the Crimean War lasted until 1876.
These twenty years were not quiet ones in the Ottoman dominions; they were a time of constant misery and torture for the abandoned Christian populations. Great Britain and France learned precisely what the “integrity and independence of the Ottoman Empire” meant in 1876, when stories of the Bulgarian massacres again reached Europe. Once more Europe faced this everlasting question of the Turk in precisely the same form as in 1856. Again the British people had to decide between expediency and principle in deciding the future of Turkey. Again the British public divided into two groups. Palmerston was dead, but his animosity to Russia and his fondness for the Turk had become the inheritance of Disraeli. With this statesman, as with his predecessor, Turkey was a nation that must be preserved, whatever might be the lot of her suffering Christians. The other part, that played by Cobden and Bright in 1856, was now played by Gladstone.
“The greatest triumph of our time,” said Gladstone in 1870, “will be the enthronement of the idea of public right as the governing idea of European politics.” And Gladstone now proposed to apply his lofty principles to this new Turkish crisis. Many of us remember the attitude of the Disraeli Government in those days. We are still proud of the part played by two Americans, McGahan, a newspaper correspondent, and Schuyler, the American Consul at Constantinople, in bringing the real facts to the attention of the civilized world.
Until these men published the results of their investigations the Disraeli Government branded all the reports of Bulgarian atrocities as lies. “Coffee-house babble” was the term applied by Disraeli to these reports, while Lord Salisbury, in a public address, lauded the personal character of the Sultan. But these two Americans showed that the Bulgarian reports were not idle gossip. They furnished Gladstone his material for his famous Bulgarian pamphlet, in which he propounded the only solution of the Turkish problem that should satisfy the conscience of the British people. His words, uttered in 1876, are just as timely now as they were then.
“Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying away themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and their Yugbashis, their Kaimakans and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned.”
Gladstone’s denunciation stirred the British conscience to its depths. The finer side of the British character manifested itself; the public conscience had made great advances since 1856, and the masses of the British people began to see the Ottoman problem in its true light. Consequently, when Russia intervened in behalf of the Bulgarians and other persecuted peoples, England did not commit the fearful mistake of 1853—she did not go to war to prevent the intervention. British public opinion at first applauded the Russian armies; when, however, the Czar’s forces approached Constantinople, the old dread of Crimean days seized the British public once more. Again Englishmen forgot the miseries of the Christians and began to see the spectre of Russia seated at Constantinople. Again Great Britain began to prepare for war; the British fleet passed the Dardanelles and anchored off Constantinople. England again declared that the safety of her empire demanded the preservation of Turkey, and gave Russia the option of war or a congress at which the treaty she had made with Turkey should be revised.