CHAP. VIII.] BROKEN HEARTS AND BRITISH INTERESTS 411

Turks to suppress the rebels, and the Austrian Government to starve them into submission.

Sir Henry Elliot is another example of the same deadening influence of contact with the Turks on minds of a narrow range. I only know him through his despatches; but I have no doubt that he is as honourable and humane as an average Scotchman with one idea-in his case, that of British interests.' Yet weeks after Sir Henry Elliot had demonstrative proof of the Bulgarian atrocities, he persisted in declaring, before all England and the world, that those who believed in them were the victims of a credulity' engendered and fostered by designing Bulgarians. And he did not think it worth while to send home till the beginning of September an important despatch from one of his own Vice-Consuls, giving a full and detailed account of one of the very worst of the Bulgarian massacres. What did it matter? Those massacred were only Bulgarians, whose dreams of freedom might imperil British interests.' I am not at all caricaturing or misrepresenting Sir H. Elliot's feelings on this question. He has saved me all the trouble of inferential reasoning, by describing his own mental attitude in a despatch which will be found on page 197 of No. 1 Blue Book for 1877.1

When the British Ambassador was expressing, in this coldblooded way, his indifference to the question whether it was 10,000 or 20,000 of innocent Bulgarians who had been ruthlessly massacred by his friends the Turks, he had Mr. Baring's Report before, with its harrowing details. The pathos of the following incident might have melted, one should suppose, even the heart of a devotee of 'British interests.' Mr. Baring, having described 'the horror of the scene. at Batak, says :-'The women were sitting on the ruins of their houses wailing and singing the most melancholy dirge, which could be heard some way from the

To the accusation of being a blind partisan of the Turks,' he says, 'I will only answer that my con duct here has never been guided by any sentimental affection for them, but by a firm determination to uphold the interests of Great Britain to the utmost of my power; and that those interests are deeply engaged in preventing the disruption of the Turkish Empire is a conviction which I share in common with the most eminent statesmen who have directed our foreign policy, but which appears now to be abandoned by shallow politicians or persons who have allowed their' feelings of revolted humanity to make them forget the capital interests involved in the question. 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. We have been upholding what we knew to be a semi-civilized nation, liable under certain circumstances to be carried into fearful excesses; but the fact of this having just now been strikingly brought home to us all cannot be a sufficient reason for abandoning a policy which is the only one that can be fol- " lowed with a due regard to our own interests.'

If the disruption of the Turkish Empire' is to be.. delayed-prevented' it cannot be it will certainly not be by the feeble tinkering of diplomatists of the calibre of Sir Henry Elliot. But, be that as it may, the

village. This wail of disconsolate anguish was, of course, nothing to a diplomatist sitting at ease in a palace on the Bosphorus, and weighing, between the puffs of his cigarette, the comparative value of Bulgarian broken hearts and sordid 'British interests.'

CHAP. VIII.] SIR H. ELLIOT'S ESTIMATE OF HUMAN LIFE. 413

6

6

striking thing in this passage is the moral torpor which it displays on the part of the wiiter. The repulsive selfishness, the cynical brutality, which it betrays, are veiled from his mind and conscience by the idol of 'British interests.' If Sir Henry Elliot would only take the trouble to analyse the code of morality which he here preaches, he would find that it differs in no respect from that practised by brigands in the defiles of the Abruzzi, except in the circumstance that the brigands would probably think that the pursuit of their interests was, on the whole, affected by the question whether it was 10,000 or 20,000 persons who perished' in a raid upon a cluster of peaceful villages. · Sir Henry does not see that if we are justified, with a due regard to our own interests,' in upholding a semicivilized nation' like Turkey, and in thinking that, in comparison with our interests, the question whether it was 10,000 or 20,000 who perished' in Bulgaria is a mere bagatelle, à fortiori were the Turks justified in taking the same view of the matter, 'with a due regard to' their interests.' We have thus from Sir Henry Elliot a full and complete apology for the Bulgarian atrocities. Sir Henry, I dare say, did not perceive that this conclusion was involved in his premisses when he wrote his despatch. Men often act on premisses of which they do not see the necessary conclusion till the catastrophe is upon them, and it is too late to retreat. When the captain of Benhadad was told by the Prophet of Israel that he should live to do deeds like those of Batak, it was with unfeigned horror that Hazael exclaimed, 'But what! is thy servant a dog, that he should do this great thing?' Yet Hazael did it, for all that. Nemo repente fuit turpissimus; and the aphorism is as true of nations as it is of their individual members. If the

disruption of the Turkish Empire should do nothing else but arrest this demoralising worship of sordid lucre, I, for one, should think the price a cheap one. When I see men like Sir Henry Elliot propounding principles which find their legitimate issue in tragedies like that of Batak, I cease to wonder that Turkish officials, from Grand Viziers down to zaptichs, should be the characters they are. A few generations' training under the Apostles of National Selfishness might reduce even Englishmen to the level of the Turk.

And now I leave the reader to answer Who are the credulous?'

CHAP. IX.]

RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT.

415

CHAPTER IX.

RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT.

GUIDANCE for the future, in political as in private life, may often be derived from experience of the past. Let us, therefore, pass in rapid review the more conspicuous phases of the Eastern Question since the Crimean War.

I believe that no small share of the present complication is due to the fact that the Government which began the Crimean War did not live to finish it. If Lord Aberdeen's Government had been a party to the Treaty of Paris in 1856, there can be little doubt that some security would have been taken, beyond an empty promise from the Sultan, for the execution of the provisions of the Hatti-humayoun. Lord Palmerston was then in the heyday of his belief in Russian duplicity and Turkish regeneration; and Lord Palmerston's influence it was which prevented the Powers from exacting from Turkey something more substantial than vapid professions of good-will towards her Christian population. When the Crimean War was imminent, but not yet declared, two divergent policies had already manifested themselves in the Cabinet; the one headed by Lord Aberdeen, the other by Lord Palmerston. On Lord Aberdeen's side was the late Prince Consort. His remarkable Memorandum for the Consideration of the