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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 25

III. Conclusion

III. Conclusion.

Our results on the whole may be summed up as follows:—

The Porte at first intended no inquiry at all into the repression, but energetically followed up the Massacres with further and rather sweeping vengeance.

It did not trust to avowed vengeance only; but prolonged the reign of terror and suffering in Bulgaria by advisedly withholding military guardianship.

To make its teaching yet more intelligible, it rewarded the most prominent cases of cruelty, and other yet worse outrage, by decorations, commands, and offices, as exhibitions of virtuous and patriotic energy; and it excluded from reward, or even visited with the punishment of dismissal, the cases, not a few, of courageous humanity among the Mussulmans, as exhibitions of a spirit unfaithful to the domination of Islam.

So far its action was perfectly spontaneous, as well as consistent; and it was singularly favoured by the extraordinary reticence, which kept back from the people of England the officially-attested knowledge of the Massacres, until in the month of August, three months after they had occurred, it began to ooze out

Then arose the indignation of this country; it resounded in every other; and in a sudden manner, and probably with surprise, the Porte, which had been exulting in the success of its great achievement, found itself charged, in the hearing of all Europe, with having committed through its agents a portentous mass of crimes.

When the first mutterings had previously reached it, Commissioners were sent out, and official papers contrived, and circulated in Europe, which by omission, and by positive falsehood, wholly put aside the charges. This measure was carefully backed by the suppression of a newspaper for page 29 daring to support them; and false confessions were extorted from the terrified population, to assure the world that they were unfounded.

After other shifts, as the Indignation "did not 'pass but grew," a Commission was appointed to proceed judicially. Men known to be bad were placed upon it to mar the action of their more honourable colleagues. The support of adequate force, which is required in order to withstand the exasperated pride of the Mahometan population, was withheld. Evasions and delays of every kind were practised; the Christians charged, and sometimes the Christian counsel who defended them, exhibited the most abject terror. The bad men of the Commission bullied and domineered from the bench. The sentences have been few, slowly extorted under incessant diplomatic pressure, with the threat of Russian arms, and with the presence and incessant vigilance of foreign agents, especially of Mr. Baring. They have also been illusory, for as to those of confinement with or without hard labour, we have no means of knowing whether it has ever been inflicted, or whether if begun it will be continued. The only real, that is the only irrevocable sentence has been that of death, pronounced after some months of delay on one or two persons; in December, on a Pomak who had previously been rewarded for his crimes: and this sentence has not yet, in March, been executed. Even were the Turks to alter now the character of their proceedings, it is far too late. We have before us, "with ample verge and room enough," the true character, first of their spontaneous view and action on the Massacres; secondly, of the niggardly amount of make-believe inquiry and retribution, which gratitude for favours too many and too recent, which the fear of estranging friendly sympathy too long maintained, which humanity, which reason, which policy, which anything short of coercion could wring out of a State, of which the heart is on this subject harder than the nether millstone.

"Duris genuit te cautibus horrens Caucasus, Hyrcanarque admôrunt ubera tigres."*

It had become too late, for a long time too late, by any spasmodic change of proceedings to abate the force of the evidence here inadequately sketched, when on Friday, the 1st of March, the Under-Secretary of State was asked whether it was true that Toussoun Bey, the Infant-slaughterer, an offender second only to Shefket Pacha, with his batch of coadjutors, had been acquitted, and whether Mr. Baring had taken away the sanction of his presence from the Court which had performed this shameless mockery of justice? The answer was, that Toussoun and his accomplices had been absolved; that Mr. Baring had departed; and that no more trials would take place.

This is not a treatise on the subject of the East at large. But the Bulgarian outrages, though they are not the Eastern Question, are a key to the Eastern Question. They exhibit the true genius of the Turkish Government. Externally an isolated though portentous fact, they unlock to us an entire mystery of iniquity. Vast as is their intrinsic importance, they are yet more important for what they indicate, than for what they are. The heaviest question of all is not what was suffered in a given district at a given date, but what is the normal and habitual condition of eight or ten millions of the subject races, who for fifteen generations of men have been in servitude to the Turk. This is, I may say, the question of questions. And of this we can best judge by observing what is the

* Virgil.—Æn. IV. 366.

page 30 conduct of the Government and its agents upon a great and palmary occasion, when, for once, it is brought fully into view. Let us see, then, what light has just been cast upon it With the outrages the Porte now stands unalterably identified; and a Government so identified is not merely weak, or impotent, or passionate, or cruel in this or that particular: it is a Government which reverses the great canon of right and wrong; and which, in the holding down of the subject races, adopts the motto given by Milton* to his Satan—

"Evil, be thou my good."

Not, indeed, that this inverted law is for the Porte an unvarying rule of action. There is no such thing in the world. Man is never consistent, in evil or in good. Hope, fear, interest, shame, a better nature breaking into light upon occasion, may produce, in its commonplace and secondary action, much that is less evil, and even some very few things that are good. But as in individual life, so in the life of Governments, it is the great crisis that searches nature to its depths, and brings out the true spirit of the man. The Bulgarian rising was a great crisis. A people of five millions, the most docile, patient, and submissive in all Europe, had dared to commence a revolt. It was as if the sheep were to attack the butcher, and fill him for a moment with alarm. Much violence, some cruelty, might in those circumstances well be understood. Habitual brutality, exasperated by fear, so far from remembering in the hour of wrath the long endurance of a suffering race, determined that in proportion to their effeminacy in bearing should be their deep descent into the pit of suffering. Bulgaria had on the whole theretofore exhibited the most splendid example of successful Turkism, in its perfect submission to terror; in the seeming extinction even of the wish to murmur; lastly, in the copious revenues yielded by its dogged industry. Alfieri boasted of the Italians, long years before their resurrection to a nation s life—

"Siam servi si; ma servi ognor frementi."

In Bulgaria generally, even the last sigh had been stifled; it seemed not even to fret for freedom. And it is no wonder if to those who had spoiled this magnificent success, this great work of art, there was due, on the principles of Turkism, under the impulses of the wild beast that dwells in human nature, an exemplary vengeance. This is not new. The wars of the Serbian and of the Greek Revolutions supplied apparent parallels to the great Bulgarian Vengeance. But Christendom had not then the open channels, which happily it now possesses, for tolerably full communication of the facts; and though we may believe, we are not judicially entitled to assert, that the Turkish Government had at those junctures, as it has had now, the wretched perpetrators of the acts for the mere tools of its master-spirit, working from the centre at Constantinople for the misery of man.

This, I say again, is upon the whole the great anti-human specimen of humanity. To exorcise it will be easy, when the exercisers are agreed; difficult only as long as some remain wrapped in contented ignorance, others case-hardened in political selfishness, and some even possessed, as the British Ambassador has been possessed, with the belief that the condition of the subject races of Turkey ought to be supremely determined by

* 'Paradise Lost,' iv. 110.

See e.g. the admirable paper of Mr. Godkin on the Eastern Question in the 'North American Review' for January, 1877,

page 31 whatever our estimate of British interests may require.* A little faith in the ineradicable difference between right and wrong is worth a great deal of European diplomacy, bewildered by views it dare neither dismiss nor avow. In this state of things, and even with the great example of Mr. Canning in the case of Greece before us, it was natural to hope, as long as hope was not irrational, that the disease of Turkey was curable; that the mild and gentle tone, which the spirit of our Century has infused into so many Governments, might find access even to the hard heart of the Porte. But this hope only could be rational, only could be even excusable, so long as it remained ready to own the truth, to conform itself to the teaching of experience. This teaching we have now, to our sorrow, perhaps even to our shame, obtained. Neither weakness, nor accident, nor ignorance, nor an occasional fit of fury, nor the unfaithfulness of agents to their principal, lies at the root of the Bulgarian Massacres. They are the true expression of the spirit and policy of the Turkish Government in seasons of emergency; when, passing from the indifference and contempt with which it commonly regards every function of civil government, except the receipt of money, it dispels the precarious ease for which at times that indifference and contempt leave room, and in the words of Bluntschli, "does not shrink from sanguinary horrors" in support of its "barbarous domination."

Again, then, I repeat the accusation. The Turkish Government, which debases its subjects when they submit, and by its agents plunders, violates, and murders them "at its own sweet will" from time to time, has a more developed and consistent method for seasons of crisis. On the occasions when they rise, as in Bulgaria, it exhausts upon them, it must be deliberately said, all the resources of a wickedness more fiendish than human, either by instigation beforehand, which is not yet proved, or by reward, protection, sanction afterwards, which is proved. After the most solemn and reiterated pledges to endow them with equality of rights, after incessant boastings of its own beneficent and paternal spirit, after trampling in the dust all these promises, and confuting all these boasts by its acts a hundred times repeated, it is inexhaustible like Proteus in ever new forms of evasion and escape, available to cozen none except those who are, lazily or perversely, willing to be deceived. Thus it is now going to be regenerated, for the hundredth time; it has launched, at length, its written Constitution. On this I do not waste a word; but I simply refer to the straightforward declaration of Sir Stafford Northcote, and to the masterly and lacerating exposure of Lord Salisbury.§ If ever, in the whole history of human action, a negative was demonstrated by experience, it is the moral impossibility that the Porte either will or can efficaciously transmute by self-reform the relation between itself and its subject races. And are we thus to go on from day to day, and from year to year?

"The days will grow to weeks, the weeks to months,
The months will add themselves and make the years."

We palter, we excuse, we set up false lights to draw us off the path; at

* "We may and must feel indignant at the needless and monstrous severity with which the Bulgarian insurrection was put down; but the necessity which exists for England to prevent changes from occurring here, which would be most detrimental to ourselves, is not affected by the question whether it was 10,000 or 20,000 persons who perished in the suppression."—Sir n. Elliot to the Earl of Derby; Sept. 4, 1876. Papers, 1. 197.

"Das Recht der Europäischen Intervention in der Türkei."—In 'Die Gegenwart,' Berlin, December 9, 1876.

'Times' of Feb. 9, 1877.

§ Papers, II. p. 302.

page 32 last with huge effort we appoint a man, yes, a real man, to speak; but he is well warned that his big brave words at Constantinople shall be well understood to be words only. What in the meantime is the state of these subject races? It is this; that their Government is the incarnate curse of their existence. If the child can laugh, if the maiden can breathe freely, if the mother can tend the house and the father till the field in peace, it is when, and so long as, the agents of this Government are not in view; and it only proves that tyrannous Power has not yet found the alchemy, by which it can convert human life into one huge mass of misery, uniform and unredeemed. What civilisation longs for, what policy no less than humanity requires, is that united Europe, scouted, as we have seen, in its highest, its united diplomacy, shall pass sentence in its might, upon a Government which unites the vices of the conqueror and the slave, and which is lost alike to truth, to mercy, and to shame. It is not a harsh sentence, but a mild one, that, at least where its guilt is thus fully proved, where the restoration of respect and confidence is hopeless, it shall submit, if not as I should desire to confine its claims to acknowledged dignity and liberal tributes,* yet at the very least to such restraints on the exercise of administrative power, as all Europe has declared to be indispensable. But above all, let us not cover with the name of compromises the new shifts we may devise to hide the nakedness of our minds, and the feebleness of our wills. A "respite" for Turkey is simply a respite to the criminal, not from punishment, but from prevention; a solemn licence to continue his misdeeds. "A year of grace" to Turkey is to Turkey's victims only another year of debasement; of want; of misery and shame, felt more or less keenly by them just in proportion as they may less or more retain the higher senses and capabilities of humanity. In this free country, every man has his word, and every man his responsibility: the action of every man contributes to make up that tide of opinion, which moves the moral world. I ask of England, that we redeem the pledges which we gave to the subject races by the Crimean War, and by the Peace which followed it. Let others if they choose invite the spreading of new snares, and walk into them in open day. With a share of the responsibility of the Crimean War upon me, I respectfully decline to join them: and I have a firm conviction that, when the people of England tell their mind to the world and to the Porte in the choice of their representatives from time to time, the lesson conveyed by their acts, so far as it goes, will be, "You shall not do it again."

March 10, 1877.

London: Printed By William Clowes And Sons, Stamford Street And Charing Cross.

* I must, once for all, beg leave to assert my strong conviction that the method of a real autonomy, superintended from abroad in the transition-stage, is the method by far the most favourable, among all that have been proposed, to the Porte itself, as well as to its subjects, and to the peace of Europe.