"Lord Granville has now to decide (in two days), before Goschen starts for Constantinople via Berlin, whether he will disgracefully abandon Greece or break up the Concert of Europe."
The Concert was kept together, but only upon condition of limiting Greece to a frontier with which Sir Charles was extremely discontented.
'On March 27th I was in a resigning humour about Greece, but could not get anybody to agree with me, and Chamberlain said that not even Liberal public opinion in England would now support isolated action or Anglo-Italian intervention. Chamberlain thought that in the interest of Greece herself it was desirable that she should be made to take the last Turkish offer, which gave her all the revenue-producing country, and kept from her the costly and the dangerous country.'
A week later he wrote a minute for Lord Granville and Mr. Gladstone, proposing that autonomy should be given to those portions of Epirote territory which were being withheld from Greece; but this plan was negatived, and a final settlement was reached on May 17th.
The settlement of 1881 was not a settlement which contented Greece and the friends of Greece; and it was only a provisional settlement.
But new complications were developing elsewhere.
'On February 1st I wrote to Gambetta by our "bag" to tell him that Sheffield' (Lord Lyons's secretary) 'would call on him from me to tell him a secret. This secret was that the Three Emperors' League was again revived and France once more isolated. But this was such a dead secret that even our Cabinet were not to know for fear some of them might talk.' [Footnote: The murder of the Emperor Alexander II. on March 13th terminated these plans for the time. But out of them subsequently grew the meeting of the three Emperors at Skierniewice on September 15th and 16th, 1884; and indirectly Prince Bismarck's "reinsurance" treaty with Russia, which his successor, Caprivi, refused to renew in 1890.]
France, though 'isolated,' was beginning to take action which threatened far-spreading trouble. Mention has been made of her pretension to Tunis, and of the support to that pretension afforded by a hint of Lord Salisbury's in 1878. In the early spring of 1881 the first serious step was taken to threaten the independence or quasi-independence of Tunis. This development was the more serious because an important dispute was in progress concerning a Tunisian estate called the Enfida, to which rival claims were put forward by M. Lévy, a British subject, and by a French company, the Société Marseillaise. On January 12th M. Lévy's representative, himself also a British subject, was expelled from the property by agents of the French Consulate.
'On February 3rd there came to me at ten o'clock in my Foreign Office boxes a telegram from Lord Lyons, which told us that the French had sent the Friedland from Toulon to Tunis to bully the Bey. I wrote off by special messenger to Lord Granville that we ought at once to send the fleet to Tunis unless the Friedland were withdrawn, and Lord Granville accepted this view, and telegraphed to Lord Lyons to that effect at noon. [Footnote: 'On February 5th, the Cabinet having approved our suggestion, we telegraphed for the Thunderer and a despatch-boat to sail at once for Tunis.']
'Our difficulty was in this matter to avoid acting with Italy. We did not want to keep the French out of Tunis, but we could not have ironclads used to force Tunisian law courts into giving decisions hostile to British subjects. Barrère wrote to me from Paris at Gambetta's wish saying that I was labouring under a grievous mistake in thinking that the Friedland was sent to settle the Enfida case against the English. The ship was sent because the Bey "declines to sign a treaty of alliance with us." At the same time he went on to say that the present policy of France would not last longer than six months, which meant, of course, that Gambetta intended to form a Government at that time (which as a fact he did), and that "our friend deplores the present policy of the Government and declines all responsibility."'