Such were the ideas that prompted the stroke of the Suez Canal shares, and his dramatic summoning of the Indian troops to Malta when Russia was before the citadel of the Levant, and India had to be impressed; that prompted, too, his proclamation of the Queen as Empress of India; and his choice of the late Lord Lytton as a poet suited for Indian Viceroyalty; these ideas, that made him announce, shortly before he died, that “London” was “the key of India.”
In this context I must dwell too for a moment on what I have already hinted concerning the temper of his diplomacy. Already, in 1860, he had recognised the full changes imposed by the spirit of the age. “... In the old days,” he observed, “diplomacy was conducted in a secret fashion, whilst now we had ‘a candid foreign policy.’ What in former times ... would have been a soliloquy in Downing Street, now becomes a speech in the House of Commons.” But that was no pretext, he also always asserted, as I shall again have to notice, for roughness and offence, for a high voice and a low hand; still less for playing censor, lecturer, or hector at once. Above all, he abominated the diplomacy which encourages by words and disappoints by deeds—the diplomacy that in 1864 promised defence to Denmark and then denied her even encouragement. Speaking then, Disraeli said: “... We will not threaten, and then refuse to act; we will not lure on our allies with expectations we do not mean to fulfil. And, sir, if ever it be the lot of myself or any public men with whom I have the honour to act, to carry on important negotiations on behalf of this country ... I trust that we at least shall not carry them on in such a manner that it will be our duty to come to Parliament to announce to the country that we have no allies, and then declare that England can never act alone.” In diplomacy, moreover, he laid great stress—as is witnessed by a striking passage in Endymion—on the need for a minister’s personal acquaintance with the chief actors on the foreign stage, and with the temper of the people whose fortunes are in their hands.[124]
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All these governing issues underlay his great Berlin Treaty. Its first principle was to uphold the effective independence of Turkey. Several absurdities have been alleged on this head. It was also bruited for political ends that, as a Semite,[125] he fostered the Moslem, whom, as a Briton, he should have suppressed.
This is not only untrue, but inaccurate. It is the sort of mistake adopted by such as imagine Mahomet to have been a Turk. Disraeli had early in life travelled far into the East, had been present at Yanina during an insurrection, had known leading pachas (one of whom consulted him), and observed inner intrigues. But while the Moslem soldier and peasant always impressed him, he detested the system of the Sultan. An early passage records this detestation. Pondering, in Contarini Fleming, the failure of successive Governments to rid Asia of “the revelations of the son of Abdallah,” he calls its whole object one “to convert man into a fanatic slave.” His two earlier romances, Alroy and Iskander, both glow with this theme—rebellion against Islam. The picturesqueness, both in scenery and history, of all Mediterranean countries,[126] fascinated him; so did the charm of the East, which, as a stripling, he defined as “repose.” But it was the habitation of the Turk, not the Turk, that exercised the spell. “Live a little longer in these countries before you hazard an opinion as to their conduct,” says one of his characters. “Do you indeed think that the rebel beys of Albania were so simple?... The practice of politics in the East may be described by one word, dissimulation....”
An adverse opinion also characterises his letters from the East, some of which are embodied in his books. Alroy, dedicated to Jerusalem, as Iskander[127] is to Athens, are neither of them favourable to Turkey. And even the Turkish want of humour annoyed him. “I never offered an opinion till I was sixty,” says the old Turk in the last romance, “and then it was one which had been in our family for a century.” He detested fanatics as he detested bores, but he loved purpose; and the sole thing that recommended the Turk to him was that, though a fanatic and a bore, he was both for a purpose. Moreover, up to 1840 the Greeks were more favourable to the Jews than the Turks; and it can scarcely be contended that his attitude to the Afghans—who are Semite by race—was prejudiced by the fact. No; if we seek for a Semitic affinity in Disraeli outside that to Israel, we must find it in that to the Saracens of Spain.
But neither is the stricture of his principle valid. As is well known, in upholding the independence of Turkey, he was following in the steps of his predecessors and indorsing the known views of two skilled diplomatists, Sir Robert Morier and Sir Henry Layard, whose political tenets were opposite to Disraeli’s. He had long before made up his mind on this subject, had defined Turkey as a “barrier” against aggression. In a speech towards the close of the Crimean War—“the Coalition War”—a speech in which he blamed the Government for their treatment of Russia, and considered Russia’s “preponderance” towards Turkey, he observed: “... I believe that there are elements, when Turkey shall be more fairly treated—and never has any country been more unfairly treated than Turkey, especially within the last two years—for securing the independence of her empire, and (what is to us of vital interest) preventing Constantinople from becoming an appanage to any great military power.”
By a tripartite treaty we, conjointly with Russia, Austria, and France, were allies bound to maintain the territorial integrity of Turkey—that is, whatever dispositions might be made, she must retain a compact and self-inclosed dominion. And why had this become a necessity for England, which is an Eastern as well as a Western power? There was a double cause—our Indian Empire and our Mediterranean trade; it was in the interest of both that a comparatively weak power should occupy the very key of the position—an historical capital whose very name symbolises empire, and whose situation, facing both east and west, dominates the Levant and commands the high-road of the Orient. As between Greece and Russia, the first undoubtedly possesses the claims of race and inheritance. The second is an interloper, and her “Greekness” springs from ecclesiastical and political usurpation. The Greek Macedonians are more hostile to Russia than to Turkey. Before now the Greeks have expressed their gratitude that Disraeli saved them from being sucked into a huge Bulgaria. It was in the interest of European peace that Constantinople should not be in the hands of a power so small, so restive, so motley, so fluid as Greece. It was in the interest of India that the Moslem pope should be upheld. It was in the interest, moreover, of the Christian subjects of the Porte themselves that Turkey should be so tied and so pledged to the great military and maritime powers in concert, that they could exact real guarantees for their protection, should brutal misbehaviour re-arise, and that the work of humanity should be left to none of these powers apart, and exposed to the temptation of indulging separate ambitions and disturbing the peace of the world. If united selfishness has deterred them from doing their duty, that must not be laid to the treaty’s charge. “Those,” he said, in 1876, “who suppose that England ever would uphold, or at this moment particularly is upholding, Turkey from blind superstition and from a want of sympathy with the highest aspirations of humanity, are deceived. What our duty is at this critical moment is to maintain the Empire of England;” and before the Congress, he again solemnly pointed out that worse, more widespread, and far more lasting agonies would be caused to myriads abroad if the misguided excitement of several sections at home were to prevail, than even by any horrors which must move both indignation and sympathy in every heart.
Into the detailed controversies of the “Bulgarian atrocities” agitation I will not here enter. It is now generally confessed that Disraeli was right not to be led away by the sensational exaggerations manufactured for Russian purposes abroad, and retailed, sometimes, for political purposes at home. Horrible savageries, of course, happened on both sides in such a war, and those horrors, from the nature of their theatre, were Oriental. But that they were bound up with racial feuds, and were in full evidence on the other side, was vouched for to me—and in great detail—some ten years after their occurrence, by Sir William White, then Ambassador at Constantinople, and by the then consul, himself a leading member of the committee for their investigation. These authorities went much further in their declarations than ever Disraeli did, with his extreme reticence in public. Indeed, they told me that the whole source of the war had been engineered by the acute irritations of Russian diplomacy, which, as Lord Derby long ago expressed it, “has never proceeded by storm, but by sap and mine.”
The true facts should not be blinked. With regard to Turkey in Europe they are both racial, political, and ecclesiastical. The race aspect was powerful with Disraeli. He always believed it to be “the key of history, and the surest clue to the characters of men in all ages.” In England he discerned the blend of “Saxon industry and Norman manners.” While it was race again that had made national institutions “the ramparts of the multitude against large estates exercising political power derived from a limited class.” Practically, it is still a question of the Slav against both Greeks (whom they have murdered) and Albanians, who themselves massacre the Serbs. Politically, it is a question of Russian influence and both Austrian and Italian jealousy. Ecclesiastically, it is a question of the freed principalities against the Patriarch of Constantinople; who, since the very time when Russia first newly pretended to the Byzantine inheritance of the Greeks, became (oddly enough) a nominee of the Sultan. From the outset Disraeli determined to undo that larger Bulgaria, stretching to the Ægean, involving all the international conflicts just hinted, and ranging from the Danube to Salonica, which Russia proposed by the clandestine Treaty of San Stefano. As is familiar, he founded a smaller Bulgaria, barriered by the Balkans, dividing it into two portions—Bulgaria and Eastern Roumelia—in the last of which he implanted autonomy. It has often been said that the sequel proved him futile, for the two slices of the big worm have since been repieced. But the events of 1885–86 which caused this reunion were the gift, not of Russian ascendency, but of those very institutions which Disraeli created. Again, it has been popularly put as if the treaty were not his own policy and had not endured. I could most easily prove the error of both these propositions. As regards the first, just as in the Reform Bill of 1867, the co-operation of both parties was necessary for the limited achievement of his views, so it fared with the need for European concert in the Berlin Treaty. But his ideas had been sketched out during the Crimean War, and the restoration of that very concert, which still subsists, was a birth of the treaty. The Berlin Treaty restored not only British prestige, but—as a foreign statesman remarked—Britain’s moral influence in the councils of Europe. It was so hailed in England, and this, as Mr. Roebuck acknowledged, was its ground for enthusiastic national support. Russia withdrew from Constantinople. Both the Dardanelles and the Turkish frontier in Europe were assured. A Sultan, then beset with bankruptcy and dynastic troubles, was given his chance of heading a party of reform championed by Midhat. Turkey was rendered compact, and lopped of mongrel provinces, while she obtained the port of Burgos on the Black Sea as a check to Russia. As regards Turkey in Asia, Disraeli’s aim, as I have already outlined, was Indian. Erzeroum, Bayazid, Alashkerd, proved powerful buffers against Russian predominance; and Russia still sways the mongrel Bessarabia then restored to her. It is now recognised that Russia, to traverse Persia, would encounter a British bayonet at every step. Disraeli’s great object, like Palmerston’s, was to prevent Turkey from becoming a fief to Russia, and the Black Sea from remaining a mere Russian lake, as the repudiation by Mr. Gladstone, in 1871, of the clause in the Treaty of Paris, for which the Crimean War had been resumed, subsequently empowered it to become. Turkey, Disraeli had written in The Press of May 21, 1853, was “a necessary evil in the European system,” but one preferable to some others, and more likely to prevent general anarchy and bloodshed. And he recalled Prince Potemkin’s old inscription on the gates of Chusan: “This is the road to Constantinople.” The standing danger was the interposal of Russian ambition on the perpetual plea of a Christian protectorate—resented by many of the Christian provinces themselves—in order to constitute Turkey a Russian province, and to spread a dominion less fanatical, perhaps, but even more merciless and repressive in Europe, however civilising it has proved in portions of Central Asia. His scheme, compassing autonomy here, independence there, compactness, the power to govern and the accountability to improve, everywhere was one of development. It held within it, as he said, the seeds of “Evolution.”