effectual guarantees for good government. Turkish promises were unfulfilled more by reason of impotence than iniquity. He contended that there was no authority for saying that Austria objected to autonomy.

It is in the direction of free local government and in that direction alone that we can seek a remedy for the present disorder. . . . I am not ashamed to say that I desire the maintenance of the territorial integrity of the Turkish Empire. (Hear.) I do not see how, if that is broken up, we can avoid very serious difficulties and dangers.-Mr. Gladstone, H. of C. July 31st.

Mr. Gladstone concluded his speech with the hope that the Government would yet find a happy solution, which while maintaining the territorial integrity should enforce adequate guarantees for good government. Thus the fact that there was any serious divergence between Mr. Gladstone and the Government hardly became apparent till Mr. Disraeli, who immediately followed him, emphatically repudiated the policy of interfering or countenancing interference with the sovereignty of the Porte, and said that Mr. Gladstone's speech was equivalent to a vote of censure on the Government.

We have said from the first that we were in favour of noninterference; we have said from the first that we should observe a strict neutrality if that strict neutrality were observed by others. There has been a difference of opinion between us and the other Powers; there has been some controversy; in what has it all ended? It has all ended by the other Powers adopting our policy. They have all, in a manner most unmistakable, admitted that non-interference is the policy that ought to be pursued, and that neutrality is the process they ought to follow. . . . We did not conceal from the House on a previous occasion that Her Majesty's Government hesitated much before they adopted the [Andrassy] Note. The reason why they hesitated was this: They were of opinion that the status quo in Turkey should be, if possible, maintained, and I understand from the right hon. gentleman he is still of that opinion. [Mr. Gladstone.-The territorial integrity.] You will find it difficult to maintain the territorial integrity of Turkey without acknowledging the principle of the status quo. . . . Servia required no redress. What Servia wanted was provinces-a very different thing. . . . The Mediterranean Fleet is the symbol and the guarantee of our power. We never concealed that we had in that part of the world great interests which we must protect and never relinquish, and it was no threat to any particular Power that we said at such a moment that the Mediterranean Fleet, which is the guarantee and the symbol of our authority, should be there, that the world should know whatever might happen, there should be no great change

in the distribution of territories in that part of the world without the knowledge and consent of England. (Prolonged cheers.)— Mr. Disraeli, H. of C. July 31st.

Thus while in the one House the Foreign Secretary was treating any contingencies that might arise out of the treaties of 1856 as outside the range of practical politics, in the other the Premier was representing England as no longer indeed isolated, since the other Powers had deferred to her views; but as lately the one Power in Europe which had stood forth as the champion of the Sultan's right to do with his subjects as he chose. He raised again that conception of the significance of the mission of the Fleet to Besika Bay which his colleague had been at such pains to lay a fortnight before, and, as we have seen, he insisted that the subject of the atrocities, as bearing on the character of the Turkish rule, must be thrown out of the account altogether, in determining the policy of this country.1

Lord Hartington, who concluded the debate, regretted that it had been necessary to discuss the question in so brief and unsatisfactory a manner, and spoke of the value of discussion in Parliament as a mode of forming opinion; but he himself was very reserved. A plain straightforward declaration by the Government of their real intention in despatching the fleet would have done more to dissipate false ideas than the two versions of the affair which had been made public. The objects of the Government he said were in the main good, but their measures were open to great question. They should have remonstrated with more energy with those Powers who broke their neutrality by allowing their subjects to help the insurgents. And they should have remonstrated with more energy on the subject of the atrocities. He thought there was no advantage in pronouncing at that moment on the particular remedy called for by the evils under which Turkey was suffering. It might be otherwise, if a time should come when, in contact with other Powers, we might usefully interpose with our advice.

The official leaders of the Opposition it was clear were rather waiting for guidance themselves than prepared to give any; even Mr. Gladstone's speech hardly came up to the point which out-ofdoor Public Opinion had already reached; and in particular, his reference to "integrity," which perhaps he first made understanded of the people 2 in his pamphlet and by his Blackheath speech, gave

1 Ante, p. 321. Compare this with Sir Henry Elliot's despatch of Sept. 5th, p. 313, and compare p. 358. 2 Post, Chap. XII. § 3.

rise to the impression that even he was not altogether weaned from the "red" policy.1

The attitude of Mr. Bruce, who may be taken as the private echo of the official language of the Ministry, and of Mr. Hanbury was promptly repudiated, and, as we are happy to remember, on the Ministerial side of the House. [By Mr. Forsyth, Sir H. D. Wolff, and in the other House by Lord Bath]. . . Compared with these expressions of Conservative members the very careful and elaborate speeches of Lord Granville and Mr. Gladstone may not improperly be held of less importance. . . . It appeared that the actors in the Crimean War were best pleased with it because it gave them a ground of moral and, it may almost be said of legal right to remonstrate with Turkey and to compel attention to their remonstrances, and we may start from this position without going back to the reasons that underlie it. Mr. Gladstone himself was feeble in the conclusion of his speech . . . when he began to use all the old phrases about maintaining the integrity of the Turkish Empire, his energy evaporated, and he seemed to forget that these were mere phrases if the first part of his speech had any meaning.-T. Aug. 1st.

Nobody made a very brilliant or very memorable speech. . . Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice had not the power to utilise his magnificent opportunity. . . . He left no impression that the right was also the statesmanlike course. Nevertheless the debate was most valuable, for it compelled the two chiefs of parties to make not only their opinions, but their policy visible to mankind. Mr. Gladstone was, in part of his speech, purely historical, and in part fettered by the restraints of conventional diplomacy; but no one who reads it carefully, or even steadily, as we trust every politician in England will do, can doubt of the policy which, were he again ruling England, he would advise Her Majesty to adopt. He would restore the accord of the Powers, with the object of securing autonomy to the Christian provinces of European Turkey. His whole speech from first to last, cautious and even timid as it occasionally seemed, was directed with wonderful art towards this single end. His long and able defence of the Crimean War—a defence unexpectedly hearty, and quite unanswerable except by men who despise history-was designed to show that Russia is not now so formidable as in 1854; that it is no longer our necessity to restrain the vast ambition of the first military Power in the world; that indeed, in appearing as the enemies of her protégés, the Christian Provincials of Turkey, we are simply playing into her hands. . . . The very first quotation made by the Premier from Mr. Gladstone's speech revealed the depth of the chasm which divides their opinions. He was of course,

1 Mr. E. Jenkins (H. of C. Aug. 11th) regretted Mr. Gladstone had spoken of the territorial integrity as a thing necessary or important to support. Compare letter from the Bishop of Manchester, post, chap. xii. § 1.

B B

corrected, but in that carefully designed and adroit blunder he had expressed his inner thoughts. . . . The victory of the Turks, the emancipation of the Christians, those, in broad outline, are the rival policies of the two great parties in the State. It is for the country to choose between them and to choose soon.-Spec. Aug. 5th.

On the whole, the debate was calculated to give the impression that the Government was as yet very far from being in sympathy with the "violet" notions. Still these had evidently made such way with the independent members of both parties, that Ministers, it might plausibly be anticipated, would soon go with the stream. Until some sign of this should be given, however, the efforts to press the "violet" policy upon them were not likely to be relaxed.

In this debate the Premier, while declining to admit the truth of the accounts of the atrocities, demurred to their relevancy in a discussion about the right policy for this country to adopt. But Public Opinion refused to allow the two matters to be separated thus. As the narrative of atrocities had been the starting-point of their interest, so to prevent atrocities was the goal of their policy. From this point of view the question whether in fact the Christian subjects of the Porte were subject to such things was pre-eminently relevant. The question of general policy had become indissolubly united with the subject of the atrocities, and the increasing strength of the impulse which was making for an active "violet" policy is shown by the tone of many members, on August 7th, when, as we have seen1 the arrival of the first accounts from the men who had been sent to Bulgaria especially to investigate caused the subject to be again mentioned in the House of Commons; and again on August 11th, when on the eve of the prorogation the growing sense of uneasiness at separating without having obtained some more definite assurance caused the subject to be once more brought forward.

Mr. Mundella said where there was such a mass of indisputable evidence as existed in the present case it was shocking that an English Minister should speak of such things as "inevitable." That was an expression which produced a great deal of pain in his mind. . . . He was not an advocate of war, but it was unworthy of England that she had not said to these Turks, one of whom had died of the scissors and another of whom was dying of something worse, "Bring this to an end, or we will point

Ante, p. 325.

our guns at your palaces." We were once governed by a man named Cromwell, who in a similar case uttered a word which brought the massacres to an end. He trusted the Prime Minister would shake off some of his present lethargy. It was high time that England awoke to her responsibility as a great Christian Power.

Mr. P. A. Taylor said they had been saddened by the language of the Prime Minister, who did all he could to cast a slur upon the accuracy of the newspaper correspondents, and who had represented those atrocities as an inevitable accompaniment of civil war... . . If that gallant old gentleman Earl Russell were in power, we knew what he would do; the name of England would not long be disgraced or mixed up with these infamies.

Mr. Jacob Bright did not know what our fleet in Besika Bay was doing; but it would gladden the heart of every Englishman if we could feel that its influence was being used in favour of humanity. It was a scandal to Europe that such crimes should occur within its borders.-H. of C. Aug. 7th.

Mr. Evelyn Ashley said this was an important moment, when the Recess was coming on and the House would not meet again for six months. He was in favour of a spirited foreign policy, but the spirit he wished to pervade our policy was a spirit of freedom on behalf of oppressed nationalities. He could not think that the Government were really opposed to the emancipation of these subject races, but he would remind hon. gentlemen opposite that the Conservative Party were kept out of office for many years by their ill-disguised hostility to Italian emancipation. (Murmurs.) Well, he would not say their hostility, but their lukewarmness. He ventured to say that if the country thought that Her Majesty's Government or the party which followed them were really indifferent to the aspiration of these subject races, the same feeling would be excited, and they would suffer from the same cause. (Cheers.)

Mr. Forster could assure the Premier he would have the support of hundreds of thousands of his fellow-subjects in this policy: "We shall take care of our own interests, and with respect to Constantinople we shall have our fleet to take care of those interests; but we cannot consent to this one thing. We cannot suffer ourselves to be implicated in the support of a Government which carries on war in this way, or attempts to put down rebel subjects or foreign enemies by a recourse to inhuman atrocities." (Cheers.)

Sir William Harcourt said in his opinion, the cries of these unhappy men, these slaughtered women and children, would not go up to Heaven in vain. Providence, which governs the fate of nations, is a Power which out of evil still educes good; but we had learnt the lesson taught by these transactions. We had not learned it soon enough, but he hoped we had learned it thoroughly. Speaking for himself, he had no hesitation in saying the moral of