"The Partition of Turkey.
"The curious are beginning to ask, Do statesmen, politicians, and Foreign Offices really wish to settle the so-called 'Eastern Question'? Does the trade hesitate to take it in hand from the dread vision of half its occupation gone? And yet what a host of evils such fainéance breeds! Take, for instance, the last miserable move, known to politics as the 'Cession of Dulcigno,' a paltry village on the wild Albanian shore. It kept the fleets of Europe at bay for a couple of months; it kept the whole of Southeastern Europe in 'hot water;' it kept newspapers in news while starving trade; and it supplied history with an episode the most comical, the most absurd. Of the Turk we may say (with Spenser)—
'That his behaviour altogether was
Alla Turchesca.'
He has adhered to his traditional policy—procrastination, promising, non-performance. 'The friendly concert of the Great Powers' has been sorely tried, strained to breaking point. Bulgaria, 'one and indivisible,' has been arming and drilling instead of tilling and earing. Greece has made it the business of her national life to raise a loan and an army of 60,000 men. Albania has, perhaps, fared the worst. The Porte encouraged her to resist the so-called 'will of Europe,' and to oppose with all her might the transfer of Albanians to Montenegrins. Then the Porte executed the normal manœuvre volte face; commanded, or pretended to command, her to give up her property; and made a happy despatch of her recusant chiefs—by means of the usual cup of coffee. The turbulent mountain region is now between two stools; she is neither Turkish nor Albanian, she is lost to the Porte without having gained her independence; and, like the Libanus in the past, she has become one of the 'tinder-boxes' of the West. Meanwhile the work of the European world has suffered, and still suffers, from an armed peace which has many of the evils and none of the good which war brings.
"When I last wrote (1879) the Turco-Russian campaign of two years, which must have cost the lives of a million human beings, had dragged itself to its weary end. It left the Sick Man weaker and more prostrated than ever—even the political doctors with their patent drugs could do no good to a constitution fast breaking up. The short respite from his sufferings called peace was not a 'peace with honour.' Resolved to maintain the 'integrity of Turkey,' the rough surgeons dismembered, disintegrated her. She was, before that treatment, a 'scattered Empire like England;' after it she became a 'geographical expression,' as was the Italy of the eighteenth century. Virtually she lost all her European provinces, except Roumelia, which took the peculiarly inconsequent title of Eastern Bulgaria. Dynastic demoralization and despotic government; diminished territory and autonomous provinces; national bankruptcy, with confusion of finance, unpaid debts, and a paper money which caused disturbances wherever it circulated, have made the Sick Man a dying man; and, instead of soothing and syruping his last moments, the greedy heirs standing by his bedside are wrangling and recriminating and calling one another names over the approaching distribution of his property.
"The 'future of Turkey' was virtually settled in 1816, when 'Field-Marshal the Duke of Wellington' proposed to the great Muscovite Empire the mediatization of Constantinople. Russia saw how great a boon this step would be to her. She may look forward to absorbing the Queen of the Bosphorus after half a century; in the present state of things she knows that the superb possession would be a well-nigh unmitigated evil. It would cut her Empire in two: and the southern would only injure the sounder and sturdier northern half. The status quo she knew to be equally detrimental; autocratic governments must obey popular will; and an ebullition of national rage may at any moment force on a campaign like that of 1877-78. She wants rest; and she wishes to recruit her finances, to reorganize her armies, and to settle conclusions with the Tartars and the Chinese. In fact, peace in Europe, but not an armed peace, is a desideratum to her, and she can obtain it only when Constantinople becomes a free town. She knew this half a century ago, and she knows it still.
"Meanwhile, the partition of Turkey has been going on merrily. In the war brought on mainly by our old enemy Rashíd Pasha, the 'rebellious Principalities,' Montenegro and Servia, have enlarged their boundaries; but both want more, and both will have more. For the characteristic of the actual 'situation' is its purely provisional nature. No one is satisfied as matters now stand; all are without exception claimants, and urgent claimants, for something more than 'administrative autonomy,' either municipal or provincial. The new 'tributary principality' of Bulgaria Proper, as I suppose we must call her, will not be satisfied with quasi independence. She has spent the last two years in preparations for a campaign; in buying arms and in drilling under Russian officers. She waits only for Greece to begin the game; whilst Greece says, 'Gentlemen of Bulgaria, fire first.' It is the old story of the Earl of Chatham and Sir Richard Strachan. Eastern Roumelia, which is Southern Bulgaria, cannot be satisfied with her rank as a mere province, even under a nominal Christian Governor whose ministry rules. She must conquer her freedom; and she will conquer it by uniting with Bulgaria Proper, and by throwing herself into the arms of Russia, if we compel her to commit this act of political suicide.
"Greece, that progressive little kingdom, which has been so much and so unjustly abused by the sentimentalists of England, behaved with exemplary patience during the Russo-Turkish War. She allowed herself to be cajoled by promise after promise, and now she finds that—
'In native swords and native ranks,
The only hope of freedom dwells.'
Action, in fact, is thrust upon her. The two Conferences of Berlin promised her a thin slice of enslaved Greece, which she thankfully accepted as an earnest of more. It would weary the reader to recount the miserable subterfuges and tergiversation of Turkey, who alternately presents the bittock to her lips and withdraws it, proposing impossible conditions. In this mean matter politics are complicated by something like personal spite and racial hatred. The Turk makes it a pundonor not to yield to the Greek; he would keep for his own use the right of robbery and rape, kidnapping and murdering. The Greek will bear no more the hateful yoke.