Sir Charles returned from Toulon, 'breakfasting with Gambetta on the 14th January,' and on the 15th delivered to his constituents the speech already quoted, which gave a summary of the events leading up to the war, his judgment of the facts as they existed at the time of his speaking being that the Government's whole policy was "isolated, undignified, inconsistent, unsafe." [Footnote: See p. 205]
"We stand alone, absolutely alone, in face of terms of peace which we dislike, but can't resist. Turkey is crushed, about whose integrity the Tory party raved. Russian influence will have risen and English influence fallen in the East. Greece, the anti-Russian friend of England, is not to gain. Servia and Montenegro, the tools of Russia, are to be rewarded. Bulgaria is to owe its freedom, not to Europe, but to Russia."
So much was accomplished fact. It had still to be decided how much farther Russia should be allowed to push her advantage. Upon this he said, speaking "as a European Liberal,"
'I agree with what the first Napoleon said, in those St. Helena days when he was acting Liberalism for the benefit of his historic character and of his line, that "it is necessary to set up a guaranteed kingdom, formed of Constantinople and its provinces, to serve as a barrier against Russia." The open question for discussion is whether the present Turkey serves the purpose….
'Were the choice between Russia at Constantinople and Turkey at Constantinople, I should prefer the latter. The Turkish is in ordinary times a less stifling despotism than the Russian….
'The Turks let any man go to any church and read any book, the Russians do not, and in such a position of power as Constantinople I should prefer the Turk if, as I do not think, the choice lay only there.'
Where else, then, did the choice lie? The answer is that Dilke, in his own words, "dreamed of a new Greece." He spoke of the lands then blighted by the Sultan's Government—of "rose-clad Roumelia and glorious Crete"—of countries held back by Turkish incompetence, that were by Nature incredibly rich—"the choicest parts of Europe, perhaps of the world."
"The Greek kingdom is a failure, we are told. Greece, liberated by the wise foresight of Mr. Canning, but left, on his ill-timed death, without Thessaly, Epirus, Crete, has been starved and shorn by the Great Powers. As once said Lafayette, "the greater part of Greece was left out of Greece." What kind of Greece is a Greece which does not include Lemnos, Lesbos, or Mitylene, Chios, Mount Olympus, Mount Ossa, and Mount Athos? Not only the larger part, but the most Greek part of Greece, was omitted from the Hellenic kingdom. Crete and the other islands, the coast of Thrace, and the Greek colony at Constantinople, are the Greek Greece indeed, for Continental Greece within the limits of the kingdom is by race half Slav and half Albanian. We must not, however, attach too much importance to this fact, for in all times the Greeks have been a little people, grafting themselves on to various barbaric stocks. Race is a small thing by the side of national spirit, and in national spirit the Greeks are as little Slav as the Italians are Teutonic. Even the corrupting influence of long slavery—and it was deep indeed—had not touched this spirit, and the very thieves and robbers of the hills of Greece made for themselves in Byron's days a glorious name in history. I do not think that Greece has failed. I believe in Greece, believe In the ultimate replacement of the Turkish State by powerful and progressive Greece, attached in friendship to France and England, her creators—an outpost of Western Europe in the East; and I think the day will come when even Homer's city may once more be Greek. Those who do not wish to see Slavonic claims pushed much farther than justice needs should speak their word on behalf of Greece."
From this ideal he never swerved, and the authority which he possessed in European politics helped to keep it present before the mind of Europe. Greece knew her friend, and after his death the Municipality of Athens gave his name—hodos Dilke—to a fine street in the true mother city of Hellas. [Footnote: "The name of Sir Charles Dilke is more highly prized in Greece than that of any living Englishman," wrote M. Zinopoulos, General Secretary to the Ministry of the Interior in Greece. "This feeling still survived in 1887, when we went to Athens," adds Sir Charles's note.] He never lived to see Hellenic government extend itself over Turkish fiefs, except in that poor strip of northern territory which, thanks greatly to his exertions, was secured for Greece in 1881. But before this memorial of him could be completed, while those who worked on it were still searching among his papers to reconstitute the projects he had shaped, came the realization of some of his premonitions, and the end of Turkish sway in "the most Greek parts of Greece."
'It was a good speech so far as concerned the position of Russia, of Turkey, and of the Opposition, and in its protest against Manchester Doctrine and in favour of a broader view of foreign policy, but it proposed the annexation of Egypt, a view from which I soon afterwards drew back, and which I did not hold at the time at which it became popular some years later on.'