civilised world. The partisans of Turkey were enraged beyond self-control, and vowed that the worst of all outrages that had been committed was that which was perpetrated by the publication of Mr. Macgahan’s report on the brutalities of the Turkish soldiery. The wild work of the Sepoys at Cawnpore was indeed merciful and humane compared with what had been done by the Turks at Batak. Indiscriminate butchery could alone be laid to the charge of the Indian mutineers. But in Bulgaria, before the Turk murdered his victims, he inflicted on them fiendish tortures and bestial outrages. The Province was one vast desolation covered with blackened ruins, devastated fields, putrefying corpses, and bleached skeletons. Neither age nor sex had been spared. The land would have been as silent as a desert, save for the wailing of the scattered remnant of the Christian population who had eluded the vengeance of their oppressors. As for the Porte—whose promises of reform in Bulgaria were cheerily cited by Mr. Disraeli to cast doubt on the descriptions of these atrocities—it gave but one sign of action. It promoted Achmed Aga, the barbarian who was responsible for all this wickedness, to be Governor of the Province which he had laid waste.”[93] The effect of these revelations on public opinion was heightened by Mr. Gladstone’s pamphlet, entitled “Bulgarian Horrors,” and by his speech at Blackheath on the 9th of September, wherein he convicted the Government of apologising for Turkish barbarities, when it could no longer venture to deny their existence. He laid down the lines of the new Eastern policy which England must support. The Turkish officials must be expelled from Bulgaria “bag and baggage,” and the European Provinces of Turkey granted such powers of self-government under the suzerainty of the Sultan, as would protect them from being seized by Austria and Russia on the one hand and devastated by Asiatic savages on the other. Sir Stafford Northcote and Lord Derby, in subsequent speeches, seemed to adopt the principle of Mr. Gladstone’s policy. They admitted that it was the duty of England to join the civilised Powers in preventing Turkey from opening again the floodgates of lust, rapine, and murder in Bulgaria, and the English people for the first time understood how, with the cries of their tortured neighbours ringing in their ears, the Servians and Montenegrins had flown to arms.
Some Conservative writers and speakers still tried to persuade the world that the Russian Government had bribed the Turkish Pashas to commit and the Bulgarians to submit to outrages, in order to discredit Ottoman rule in Europe. But their efforts were futile, and the word went forth from all sides that never again would England draw her sword, as in 1854, to save Turkey from the consequences of her incurable barbarism. Strange to say, Lord Beaconsfield failed to gauge the strength of this feeling. On the 20th of September, in his speech at Aylesford, he neither adopted nor rejected the policy suggested by Sir Stafford Northcote and Lord Derby, but he spoke in a querulous tone of the popular meetings which were being held all over England expressing sympathy with Bulgaria and urging the Government to shield her from the cruelty of her oppressors. The agitation, he said, was “impolitic, and founded on erroneous data.” Those who got up these meetings, he declared, were guilty of outrages on “the principle of patriotism, worse than any of those Bulgarian atrocities of which we have heard so much.” His negative policy which destroyed the Berlin Memorandum without putting any counter proposals in its place, would, he contended, have had a happy issue in negotiations. These, however, were upset by the unexpected Servian declaration of war against Turkey, which was prompted by “the Secret Societies.” Yet England had signed the Andrassy Note, which warned Turkey that this unexpected war would be waged against her by Servia, unless she granted the reforms demanded in the Note. When Turkey, instead of granting these reforms, massacred the population that craved for them, it was absurd to suppose that “the Secret Societies of Europe,” rather than the popular sympathies of the Christian Slavs, forced the Servian Government into war. That the speech fell flat was seen by the polling at the Buckinghamshire Election next day, when in Lord Beaconsfield’s own county Mr. Freemantle only saved the seat from the attack of Mr. Rupert Carrington, the Liberal candidate, by the small majority of 186. There were now two voices in the Cabinet; for on the day after Lord Beaconsfield’s speech was made and was taken by Turkey to mean that she had the English Cabinet on her side, Lord Derby ordered Sir H. Elliot to go to the Sultan, and not only denounce the outrages in Bulgaria, but, in the name of the Queen, who was profoundly shocked by them, demand that the officials who perpetrated them be adequately punished. It is hardly necessary to say that the Sultan, imagining that the Prime Minister was all-powerful, paid no heed to remonstrances from the Foreign Secretary. On the 25th of September, the day after the war with Servia began, Sir H. Elliot pressed the Porte to make peace on terms which Lord Derby suggested, and which were most creditable to his diplomatic sagacity. Lord Derby’s proposals, if carried out, would have saved Turkey from the supreme disaster which was awaiting her, for they provided that the Porte should effectively guarantee administrative reforms in her Christian Provinces, while Servia and Montenegro should lay down their arms and return to the status quo ante bellum. The Porte would only accept an armistice which would have been unfair to Servia and Montenegro, and Servia would not accept a settlement which did not provide for the withdrawal of the barbarous soldiers of Turkey from Bulgaria. Whilst negotiations were pending, the Turks, on the 29th of October, beat down the Servian defence at Alexinatz, whereupon, to the mortification of England, the Czar effected in an instant that which Lord Derby, after many weary weeks of negotiation, had failed to accomplish. Ignatieff was instructed to tell the Porte that if it did not accept an armistice of six weeks within forty-eight hours, diplomatic relations between Turkey and Russia would cease. When the same threat had been delivered by the British Ambassador, the Turks ignored it; in fact, they were impudent enough to meet it with a counter-proposal so absurd, that the Italian Minister said they were obviously playing with England. Although strengthened by a great victory, they did not, however, dare to treat the representative of the Czar as if he were the representative of the Queen. They accepted his ultimatum without demur or delay, and thus owing to the feebleness of English diplomacy, Russia emerged with the honours of the game in which, up to the last moment, Lord Derby held the winning cards. This was, however, a minor matter. Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Derby had now given Russia not only a plausible pretext for taking the lead in dealing with the Eastern Question, but also an opportunity for intimating to the world that, in circumstances which extorted the sanction of the Continental Powers, she had the right, in case of a deadlock, to deal with it single-handed. In other words, the English Government, by allowing the Porte to trifle with it during September, 1876, flung away at one cast the only practical results won by the Crimean War.
LORD BEACONSFIELD AT THE BANQUET IN THE GUILDHALL.
The Czar now proposed that a coercive naval demonstration by the Powers should be made in the Bosphorus, but Lord Derby rejected the idea. After some weeks he suggested that a Conference of the Powers should be held to
GENERAL VIEW OF CONSTANTINOPLE.