We have no doubt that the Emperor of Russia was led into similar error with respect to this country. He was assured that it had become selfish and apathetic from its unexampled prosperity; and that so opulent and so sensual a nation would never expose itself, after so long a peace, to the chances and the dangers of a long war, for the sake of maintaining the integrity and independence of an empire whose people preferred the Koran to the Bible. Their commercial prudence, the love of ease engendered by opulence, the long period of time that passed since the wars with the first Napoleon, the many important interests which have grown up since then, religious antipathy—everything, in fact—indisposed the English nation to interfere with his designs in Turkey. But the presence in the Government of a statesman, recently so ridiculed and insulted by those who were now his colleagues, believed to be a warm admirer of the Emperor of Russia, and known for his cold hatred of the Emperor of the French, was considered the most fortunate circumstance of all; it was, at any rate, a guarantee against any favourable understanding with France or her ruler. Letters, said to be from that statesman, addressed to one of the former ministers of Louis Philippe, were read in one of the principal Russian saloons in Paris, the most notorious of all for intrigues, and the resort of the leaders of every anti-national party. These letters, asserted to be genuine, are described as having alluded in terms of the greatest contempt to the person, the character, and the intellect of Louis Napoleon; and as containing declarations that, under no circumstances whatever, could England act with France so long as its present regime lasted. The scum of the Orleanist agency were sent round to circulate the news, and despatches addressed to St Petersburg repeated the same. The tone of a portion of the daily press in England with reference to France seemed to confirm those assurances, and to render the formation of a coalition against the French Emperor, in which it was hoped England would join, by no means a difficult nor an improbable task. The falsest of all these calculations was unquestionably that which represented England as labouring under an oppression of wealth, a plethora of opulence, of which indifference, timidity, and inaction were the consequences. Yet such is the description given of us to Russia by Orleanists, whose incapacity and cowardice produced the overthrow of the dynasty of July. The acquisition of wealth and power supposes the possession of great energy of character; for those qualities we have been distinguished above all other people. That we have not become wearied or satiated, the events of each day that passes over our heads prove; and whatever be the period at which we are destined to reach the declining point, and which such scribblers as Ledru Rollin and the like maintain we have attained, we ourselves believe that the fatal moment is still far distant. We have shown energy without example, since the time of the Romans, in making ourselves what we are; and we are ready to let the world see that we know how to maintain the power which was supposed to have enervated us, with more than Roman courage. With admitted social and political evils—far less, however, than any other nation on earth—we have not become corrupt or effeminate. It is not true that the extraordinary development of our public and private fortune has buried us in that shameful indolence which made the Romans so easy a prey to the barbarians. Prosperity has not made us forget or disregard our rights. The wonderful development of our railway communications and our steam navigation, the extension of our commerce, the pacification of India, the colonisation of Africa, ought to have shown the Emperor of Russia that we have not yet fallen from our high estate in the political or moral world. The mighty fleets and the gallant bands of warriors that are even now conveying to him our answer to his insolent defiance, will show him the magnitude of his error. Our courage and our activity, our resolution in council, and our sternness in execution, are in proportion to the grandeur of the interests we have to defend. Our decline, much less our fall, has not yet commenced; and if any foreign or domestic friend has persuaded Russia that we resemble the Romans in the latter days of their empire, and that we are in a condition to fall a prey to the barbarians, he is an idiot or a calumniator.
Nothing is now so clear as that the Emperor of Russia has been most grossly deceived with respect to Turkey; but it is just to admit that the error has been also shared by many who should know better. Prince Menschikoff, during his short sojourn at Constantinople, had only time to insult the Sultan and his government, but also time to rouse a spirit of resentment and resistance. The backwardness of Turkey in civilisation was taken as a proof of her weakness and her deficiency in moral courage. But, with all her shortcomings, the old Mussulman spirit still subsisted amid the ruins of her former glory. It has been said that there are qualities which are effaced or destroyed by refinement, but there are others which live without it, though the occasion may have seldom occurred to call them forth. Turkish patriotism was regarded as a byword, Turkish loyalty as a mockery; Turkish courage was more than doubtful; and nothing remained of the daring valour which, in other times, made Christendom quail before the Crescent, except that vigour of faith which once distinguished the children of the Prophet: and even that, we were led to believe, had degenerated into a brutal and ignoble fanaticism, capable of vulgar crime, but unequal to a single act of heroism. The arrogant envoy of Russia rendered an essential service, not to his imperial master, but to his intended victim. His insults roused the dormant spirit of the Mussulman. The Ottoman army was undisciplined—unprovided with the commonest necessaries; the navy was but the melancholy remnant of Navarino; the Sultan’s authority was weakened by internal abuses and disorders; his territory dismembered by the separation of Greece, and by the all but successful rebellion of Egypt. Those to whom he looked for aid or protection against his colossal foe were long cold, if not hostile to him; yet Turkey rose with a courage and a dignity which have extorted applause, and won respect, even from those who were most indisposed to her cause, politically and religiously. She summoned her children about her; appealed, not to the relentless fanaticism of their creed, but to their manlier and nobler instincts; and after making every sacrifice, every concession consistent with self-respect, to appease or disarm her unscrupulous and faithless enemy, who was bent on her destruction, drew the sword in the cause of her independence. Whilst still uncertain whether she was to maintain the struggle alone and unsympathised with, against fearful odds, she advanced to the contest with a bravery worthy of better times, and with a success which has astonished her friends as well as foes. The feelings which Prince Menschikoff believed he could most safely outrage were those which quickened the nation into life and vigour. The Emperor of Russia was astonished at a result so different from what he was led to expect. The advices which had reached him from his friends in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and Constantinople, were such as might have been true some twenty years ago, but were false in 1853. France and England were said to be divided, and likely to remain so as long as a Buonaparte ruled the destinies of the former, and as long as Lord Aberdeen directed the administration of the latter. France had become exhausted by revolution, discontented with her new chief, demoralised, and rotten at the very heart;—no remedy to restore her, till the Count de Chambord, or the Count de Paris, was restored to the throne; and with England, satiated and unwieldy with unwholesome prosperity, no desire remained, no passion survived, but that of enjoying in undisturbed tranquillity what she had hardly acquired. Count Orloff has learned something at Vienna; but it does not appear that the lesson has much profited him or his imperious master.
In these multiplied and intricate transactions, in which Russia was alternately the deceived and the deceiver, there is one point in particular to which we would direct the attention of our readers. We allude to the claim made by the Porte to the intervention of the great powers in its quarrel with Russia. It is a claim based on equity and on international law, which it is impossible to dispute. Previous to 1841, Turkey was hardly looked upon as forming part of the general combination of European states in the settlement of any great international question. Rightly or wrongly, the Turks were considered less as forming an integral part of the European family of nations, than as an agglomeration of various tribes of warriors, bound together only by a common superstition and a common fanaticism; not rooted in the soil they occupied, but merely encamped on the outskirts of Christendom. The Treaties of 1841, which facilitated to France the resumption of her place in Europe, after her separation the previous year, also admitted Turkey to that general political association. That privilege or right Turkey has not forgotten in her hour of need, as we believe she would have done in her hour of prosperity; and in her appeal to the world against the pretensions of Russia, she summoned Austria, France, Prussia, and Great Britain, in the name of those solemn obligations, to come to her aid. She maintained that her participation in what is termed, in diplomatic parlance, the Concerte Européen, was recognised; and she showed, we think successfully, that henceforth all questions affecting the independence and integrity of her territory should be brought before the great tribunal of European states, and not left to the judgment of a single and an interested power. The principle of the right claimed by Turkey was admitted by the Cabinets of Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and London; and that recognition is manifest in the documents that have been made public. In the note addressed to the Austrian Cabinet on the 31st December 1853, we find this declaration:—“The multiplicity of the relations and the alliances of the Sublime Porte and of the European States, giving to it, in every respect, the right and the faculty of participating in the community which binds these States to each other, and to the security which they derive from them, the necessity will be felt of confirming and completing in that sense the Treaty of 1841, and for that it reposes on the friendly efforts of the allied Courts.” And the allied Courts, in turn, declared, “that the Russian Government, which invaded the territory of the Sultan, had placed itself in opposition with the resolutions declared by the great powers of Europe in 1840 and 1841. That, moreover, the spirit of the important transaction in which Russia took part in 1841 with the other powers, and with Turkey herself, is opposed to the pretension that the affairs of the East should be treated otherwise than in common, and in the conferences in which all these interests should be examined and discussed. And it must be well understood that every such question must be treated by five; and that it does not belong to one or to two cabinets to settle, separately or apart, interests which may affect the whole of Europe.” The allies of Turkey also added, “that the Treaty of 1841, in the meaning of which all are this day agreed, is to serve as the basis of operations. All the powers who have signed that treaty are qualified to appeal to it. We present ourselves as the defenders of that treaty, violated in its spirit, and as the supporters of the equilibrium of Europe, menaced by the power which seemed, more than any other, to have the pretension of constituting herself the guardian of it. The cause for which we are armed is that of all.” That claim of Turkey to form part of the European community is precisely the one to which Russia is inexorably opposed. Its admission would destroy the monopoly of interference and protection which the Czar wishes to maintain over Turkey, and we need not therefore be surprised at the stern refusals which the good offices of any other power have invariably encountered at St Petersburg. Russia insisted throughout that the question only regarded Russia and Turkey; it denied the right of any one to interfere, except in advising Turkey to submit to her dictates; and to the last she rejected all intervention or mediation. It is true that intervention menaced the fundamental principle on which the traditional policy of Russia is based; and the day that the Treaty of 1841 forms part of the international law of Europe, the designs of Russia on Turkey are at once arrested. Russia will then have lost all exclusive rights; and all questions of public interest affecting the Porte must be treated by all the states who have affixed their signatures to that important instrument.
We are decidedly of opinion that the view taken by Turkey of the rights created for her by this new state of things, is the correct one; and we submit that the interpretation which gives the greatest effect to the joint engagement of the four powers, is that which is most conformable to the spirit and meaning of its framers. “The important act of this Convention,” said M. Guizot in the Chamber of Peers, “is to have included the Porte itself, the inviolability of the sovereign rights of the Sultan, the repose of the Ottoman Empire, in the public law of Europe. Therein is comprised the general recognition—the recognition made in common, and officially declared—of the inviolability of the sovereign rights of the Porte, and of the consolidation of the Turkish Empire. It cannot be supposed that France would have refused to facilitate by her adhesion the execution of that act.” “The Turco-Egyptian question,” said the same minister in the Chamber of deputies, “was settled—the question of Constantinople remained. What is the object the policy of Europe has in view for a long time past with reference to Constantinople? It is to withdraw Constantinople from exclusive protection; to admit Turkey into our European law; and to prevent her from becoming the Portugal of Russia. Well, then, a step has been made towards that end. It is true that the Porte has not been secured from ambition of all kinds—from all the chances of the future; but, at all events, we have an official instrument, signed by all the great powers of Europe, which admits Turkey into the European law, which declares that it is the intention of all the great powers to respect the inviolability of the Sultan’s rights, and to consolidate the repose of the Ottoman Empire.”
There is no doubt that Russia is deeply interested in the possession of Constantinople. It is equally certain that, whenever she becomes mistress of both shores of the Bosphorus, she will, in an incredibly short time, add to her present pre-eminent military character that of a first-rate commercial and maritime power. The populations that would then acknowledge the supremacy of the Knout would be over eighty millions; and the seventy millions of Christians professing the Greek faith would bow their necks to the political and religious autocrat. Russia would then indeed hold at her girdle the keys of the Caspian Sea, the lake of Azof, the Black Sea, and the Mediterranean. The possession of Syria and Egypt would before long follow, as a matter of course, that of Turkey in Europe; and soon the fairest regions in the world, the most fertile shores of that inland sea, would fall under her rule. A single glance at the map will enable us to comprehend the magnificence, the vast extent, of such an acquisition; and the mind may dwell with wonder on the immensity of the new Russian Empire in Europe and Asia, and anticipate the supremacy she would gain by the conquest of Constantinople, which opens to her a path to the very heart of civilised Europe. That Russia should make gigantic efforts, and risk, as she is now risking, her rank as a first-rate Power, if not her existence, to attain such an object, is not astonishing. The fair capital that stands on the Bosphorus is the guarantee of the empire of the world. It is more than the ambition of Alexander, of Charlemagne, or of Napoleon, ever dreamed the realisation of; and if treachery or violence ever gives it to Russia, the irresistible and universal domination of Rome over the rest of the world, after the fall of Carthage, alone furnishes an example of what Russia would then become.
Russia has, by the tolerance or apathy of Europe, been singularly favoured since the seventeenth century; and she whose name was not even mentioned in the Treaty of Westphalia, which defined the limits of the great European states, has risen to gigantic proportions since then. She has invariably availed herself, as she is now ready to do, of the dissensions of the Western kingdoms; she has absorbed provinces and nations of various tongues, religions, and races; and has opened her way, through the territories of her neighbours, to the shores of two seas. Her hand it was that put an end to the existence of Poland. It was she that paralysed Sweden and Denmark; and it is by her that Persia and Turkey have been pushed on to their ruin. The history of her crimes in Poland is the same as that of her plunder in Turkey, Georgia, and Persia; and the partition of the ancient northern kingdom is now to be repeated with the Ottoman Empire. The means she employs are ever the same;—menaces and caresses by turns;—attempts at exclusive intervention;—a slow but steady system of dismemberment;—pretensions and claims, as impudently advanced as they are unfounded; then apparently withdrawn, postponed, placed in abeyance, seemingly forgotten, but never finally abandoned; revived with hypocritical humility, or with arrogance, according to circumstances; pretexts of quarrel of the most imaginary and untenable kind; intimidation mingled with seduction. Nothing is too bold, too base for her selfishness. Her princes and nobles are spies; her princesses—worse. No profligacy is too gross, no crime is too enormous, that advances by one inch the influence of “Holy Russia.” War is undertaken for no other object than to arrive at conventions ruinous to the conquered. Such is the hereditary policy of Russia; such it has been since she first assumed a standing in Europe; and we say it to our shame, that her unexampled success is in great part owing to the selfishness of some, the exaggerated fears of others, and the indifference and apathy of all the states of Europe. If England and France had but pronounced a veto in 1774, Poland might, with a reformed constitution, and an improved administration, still be an independent kingdom, and stand the barrier between the barbarism of the north and the civilisation of the west. If the Western Powers had directed their attention a little more frequently, and more earnestly to Turkey, the events against which we are now preparing might not have taken place. Even now, it is not too late; and we firmly believe that it is in the power, as we have little doubt it is the desire, of Europe, to arrest for many years the aggressive policy of Russia.
We have heard one argument advanced against our interference to save Turkey from Russia, and which seems to have made a certain impression in some quarters. We think the argument to be more specious than real; and the only reason we notice it here is, because it has been dwelt upon by persons whose opinions are in other respects entitled to consideration. We are told that it is a shame and a scandal for a civilised and religious nation to go to war in support of a barbarous and unbelieving Government. If such an argument mean anything, it must mean that England is to have no ally but such as can boast of equal civilisation, and profess the same faith as ourselves. We deny that we go to war, and in support of Turkey, in order to insure the supremacy of the Koran over the Bible, of the Crescent over the Cross, of barbarism over civilisation. We take the part of Turkey, not on religious grounds, but on political; to prevent the extension of Russia in those parts of Europe and Asia where her power would seriously endanger the vital interests of Western Europe; to maintain what is termed the balance of Europe; or, in other words, to prevent any one Power from growing to such a colossal size as that all the others would be at her mercy. We do not go to war to continue Mussulman barbarism, or to perpetuate the despotism under which the Christian populations have groaned. The conditions on which France and England afford succour to the Sultan are, that the reform long since commenced by Sultan Mahmoud, and continued by Abdul Medjid, shall be still further developed; and that the Christian subjects of the Porte, whose condition has materially improved, shall be placed on an equality with the Mussulmans. As well might it be said that our wars in Spain had for their object the protection of the Roman Catholic religion, the consolidation of the influence of the Pope, the re-establishment of the Inquisition, or the perpetuation of the stupid despotism of Ferdinand. We entered on the Peninsular war, not for such objects, but for reasons similar to those which now lead us to the East;—to rescue the Spanish territory from the grasp of a usurper, from the power of a conqueror whose ambition of universal rule was not less than that of Nicholas; to prevent the whole of Europe from falling under the dominion of a single potentate. In this country we denounce the doctrines of the Church of Rome as contrary to Scripture, and we, a Protestant Government, employed its armies in defence of a nation whose principle has been, and still is, intolerance of all other creeds but its own, and against a Government which, whatever may have been its faults, had not, at all events, religious intolerance among them. In no country is the Roman Catholic religion made to assume a more odious form than in Spain. We are told that the Turks speak of Christians as “dogs;” but, in Christian Spain, English Protestants are actually treated as dogs, or worse. We have seen, and this within a very few years, those who fought, and bled, and died in the cause of Spanish independence, flung, like offal, into a hole, or left to rot on the sea coast below high-water mark. We have, within the last few months, witnessed the tedious negotiations carried on between our Minister at Madrid and the Government in whose cause our blood and treasures have been spent with profusion, to obtain a secluded spot of earth wherein the bones of those of our countrymen, who still labour to introduce civilisation into that country, may be sheltered from pollution; and we have no cause to rejoice at its humiliating conclusion. When we are told of Turkish bigotry and intolerance, we would point to Madrid, to Naples, and to Tuscany. Turkish honour and Turkish fidelity to engagements will not suffer by a comparison with the Government of her most Catholic Majesty, as we presume those Englishmen who have had anything to do with it will be ready to admit. We are not of opinion that the barbarism of the Turks is greater than that which may be found in many parts of the Spanish peninsula; and those who have travelled into the interior of both countries may bear witness to the fact that her Catholic Majesty’s subjects, with the exception of the large towns, cannot be surpassed by any others in ignorance, sloth, and bigotry. Corrupt as the Turkish Government may have been, and badly administered as the country unquestionably is, we doubt whether the general run of Spanish statesmen have exhibited much more probity, integrity, and talent in government, with all the advantages of our example; and, in the matter of private morals, we think we could point out Spanish sovereigns who, with all their piety and attachment to Catholicism, have not much to boast over Sultan Abdul Medjid. We are not of opinion that, as respects mere civilisation, the Russian serfs are superior to the Turks. We have no evidence that Russia has made any improvement within the recollection of the present generation; while it is undeniable that, within the same space of time, Turkey had made, and is still making, material progress in its administration. Since the time of Mahmoud, Turkey—though, of course, still far behind France and England—has effected immense ameliorations in all matters connected with internal navigation, with her military and naval establishments, and her political and judicial administration; and, from the great improvement that has taken place in the condition of her Christian populations, we are confident that, before long, she will realise the wish of Mahmoud, and those populations will be placed on a footing of political equality with the Mussulmans. We doubt whether all these things can be stated of Russia.
The Grand-duke Michael is said to have predicted the dismemberment of the Russian Empire soon after the death of the present autocrat. Whatever be the claims of that prince to the character of a prophet, it is evident that Russia is now approaching a more important crisis. Russia will give way, or she will not. If the former, her prestige is gone, and the pettiest Continental kingdom may regard her with indifference. If the latter, a more terrible fate may await her, for she can scarcely resist all that is powerful in Europe combined against her. Russia has been to Europe, for the last forty years, what a ball remaining in an old wound is to the limb of a veteran. Every change of temperature, the heat of summer, the cold of winter, produces uneasiness and pain. The ball must now be extracted; the wound must now be entirely closed up, that we may be all at rest.
Since the preceding pages were written, a “Confidential correspondence” has been brought to light, which no longer leaves any mystery in this once incomprehensible question. Our readers will find these important documents, and the indefensible conduct of the Ministry in the matter, fully discussed in the concluding article of this Number.