Chapter VI. The Black Sea. (1870-1871)
“You are always talking to me of principles. As if your public law were anything to me; I do not know what it means. What do you suppose that all your parchments and your treaties signify to me?”
—Alexander I. To Talleyrand.
I
At the close of the Crimean war in 1856 by the provisions of the treaty of Paris, Russia and Turkey were restrained from constructing arsenals on the coast of the Euxine, and from maintaining ships of war on its waters. No serious statesman believed that the restriction would last, any more than Napoleon's restraint on Prussia in 1808 against keeping up an army of more than forty thousand men could last. Palmerston had this neutralisation more at heart than anybody else, and Lord Granville told the House of Lords what durability Palmerston expected for it:—
General Ignatieff told me that he remarked to Lord Palmerston, “These are stipulations which you cannot expect will last long,” and Lord Palmerston replied, “They will last ten years.” A learned civilian, a great friend of mine, told me he heard Lord Palmerston talk on the subject, and say, “Well, at all events they will last my life.” A noble peer, a colleague of mine, an intimate friend of Lord Palmerston, says Lord Palmerston told him they would last seven years.[220]
In 1856 Mr. Gladstone declared his opinion, afterwards often repeated, that the neutralisation of the Black Sea, popular as it might be in England at the moment, was far from being a satisfactory arrangement.[221] Were the time to [pg 350] come, he said, when Russia might resume aggressive schemes on Turkey, he believed that neutralisation would mean nothing but a series of pitfalls much deeper than people expected.[222] These pitfalls now came into full view. On the last day of October Prince Gortchakoff addressed a circular to the Powers, announcing that his imperial master could “no longer consider himself bound to the terms of the treaty of March 1856, in so far as these limit his rights of sovereignty in the Black Sea.” On the merits there was very little real dispute in Europe. As Lord Granville once wrote to Mr. Gladstone: “There was no doubt about Germany having at Paris, and subsequently, always taken the Russian view. France made an intimation to the same effect very soon after the conclusion of the treaty. And Austria later. Italy did the same, but not in so decided a manner.... I have frequently said in public that with the exception of ourselves and the Turks, all the co-signatories of the treaty of Paris had expressed views in favour of modifying the article, previous to Prince Gortchakoff's declaration.”[223]
The Russian Circular
To have a good case on the merits was one thing, and to force it at the sword's point was something extremely different. As Mr. Gladstone put it in a memorandum that became Lord Granville's despatch, “the question was not whether any desire expressed by Russia ought to be carefully examined in a friendly spirit by the co-signatory powers, but whether they are to accept from her an announcement that by her own act, without any consent from them, she has released herself from a solemn covenant.”[224] Mr. Gladstone, not dissenting on the substance of the Russian claim, was outraged by the form. The only parallel he ever found to Gortchakoff's proceedings in 1870 was a certain claim, of which we shall soon see something, made by America in 1872. “I have had half an idea,” he wrote to Lord Granville, “that it might be well I should see Brunnow [pg 351] [the Russian ambassador] either with you or alone. All know the mischief done by the Russian idea of Lord Aberdeen, and the opposition are in the habit of studiously representing me as his double, or his heir in pacific traditions. This I do not conceive to be true, and possibly I might undeceive Brunnow a little.”