Part 60 (2/2)
It was the object of Lord Salisbury to show that the effects of the Treaty of San Stefano, taken in a ma.s.s, threatened the peace and the interests of Europe, and therefore, whatever might be advanced for or against individual stipulations of the Treaty, that the Treaty as a whole, and not clauses selected by one Power, must be submitted to the Congress if the examination was not to prove illusory. This was a just line of argument. Nevertheless it was natural to suppose that some parts of the Treaty must be more distasteful than others to Great Britain; and Count Schouvaloff, who was sincerely desirous of peace, applied himself to the task of discovering with what concessions Lord Beaconsfield's Cabinet would be satisfied. He found that if Russia would consent to modifications of the Treaty in Congress excluding Bulgaria from the Aegean Sea, reducing its area on the south and west, dividing it into two provinces, and restoring the Balkans to the Sultan as a military frontier, giving back Bayazid to the Turks, and granting to other Powers besides Russia a voice in the organisation of Epirus, Thessaly, and the other Christian provinces of the Porte, England might be induced to accept without essential change the other provisions of San Stefano. On the 7th of May Count Schouvaloff quitted London for St.
Petersburg, in order to lay before the Czar the results of his communications with the Cabinet, and to acquaint him with the state of public opinion in England. On his journey hung the issues of peace or war.
Backed by the counsels of the German Emperor, Schouvaloff succeeded in his mission. The Czar determined not to risk the great results already secured by insisting on the points contested, and Schouvaloff returned to London authorised to conclude a pact with the British Government on the general basis which had been laid down. On the 30th of May a secret agreement, in which the above were the princ.i.p.al points, was signed, and the meeting of the Congress for the examination of the entire Treaty of San Stefano was now a.s.sured. But it was not without the deepest anxiety and regret that Lord Beaconsfield consented to the annexation of Batoum and the Armenian fortresses. He obtained indeed an a.s.surance in the secret agreement with Schouvaloff that the Russian frontier should be no more extended on the side of Turkey in Asia; but his policy did not stop short here. By a Convention made with the Sultan on the 4th of June, Great Britain engaged, in the event of any further aggression by Russia upon the Asiatic territories of the Sultan, to defend these territories by force of arms.
The Sultan in return promised to introduce the necessary reforms, to be agreed upon by the two Powers, for the protection of the Christian and other subjects of the Porte in these territories, and further a.s.signed the Island of Cyprus to be occupied and administered by England. It was stipulated by a humorous after-clause that if Russia should restore to Turkey its Armenian conquests, Cyprus would be evacuated by England, and the Convention itself should be at an end. [555]
[Congress of Berlin, June 13-July 13.]
[Treaty of Berlin, July 13.]
The Congress of Berlin, at which the Premier himself and Lord Salisbury represented Great Britain, opened on the 13th of June. Though the compromise between England and Russia had been settled in general terms, the arrangement of details opened such a series of difficulties that the Congress seemed more than once on the point of breaking up. It was mainly due to the perseverance and wisdom of Prince Bismarck, who transferred the discussion of the most crucial points from the Congress to private meetings of his guests, and who himself acted as conciliator when Gortschakoff folded up his maps or Lord Beaconsfield ordered a special train, that the work was at length achieved. The Treaty of Berlin, signed on the 13th of July, confined Bulgaria, as an autonomous Princ.i.p.ality, to the country north of the Balkans, and diminished the authority which, pending the establishment of its definitive system of government, would by the Treaty of San Stefano have belonged to a Russian commissioner. The portion of Bulgaria south of the Balkans, but extending no farther west than the valley of the Maritza, and no farther south than Mount Rhodope, was formed into a Province of East Roumelia, to remain subject to the direct political and military authority of the Sultan, under conditions of administrative autonomy. The Sultan was declared to possess the right of erecting fortifications both on the coast and on the land-frontier of this province, and of maintaining troops there. Alike in Bulgaria and in Eastern Roumelia the period of occupation by Russian troops was limited to nine months.
Bosnia and Herzegovina were handed over to Austria, to be occupied and administered by that Power. The cessions of territory made to Servia and Montenegro in the Treaty of San Stefano were modified with the object of interposing a broader strip between these two States; Bayazid was omitted from the ceded districts in Asia, and the Czar declared it his intention to erect Batoum into a free port, essentially commercial. At the instance of France the provisions relating to the Greek Provinces of Turkey were superseded by a vote in favour of the cession of part of these Provinces to the h.e.l.lenic Kingdom. The Sultan was recommended to cede Thessaly and part of Epirus to Greece, the Powers reserving to themselves the right of offering their mediation to facilitate the negotiations. In other respects the provisions of the Treaty of San Stefano were confirmed without substantial change.
[Comparison of the two Treaties.]
Lord Beaconsfield returned to London, bringing, as he said, peace with honour. It was claimed, in the despatch to our Amba.s.sadors which accompanied the publication of the Treaty of Berlin, that in this Treaty the cardinal objections raised by the British Government to the Treaty of San Stefano had found an entire remedy. ”Bulgaria,” wrote Lord Salisbury, ”is now confined to the river-barrier of the Danube, and consequently has not only ceased to possess any harbour on the Archipelago, but is removed by more than a hundred miles from the neighbourhood of that sea. On the Euxine the important port of Bourgas has been restored to the Government of Turkey; and Bulgaria retains less than half the sea-board originally a.s.signed to it, and possesses no other port except the roadstead of Varna, which can hardly be used for any but commercial purposes. The replacement under Turkish rule of Bourgas and the southern half of the sea-board on the Euxine, and the strictly commercial character a.s.signed to Batoum, have largely obviated the menace to the liberty of the Black Sea. The political outposts of Russian power have been pushed back to the region beyond the Balkans; the Sultan's dominions have been provided with a defensible frontier.” It was in short the contention of the English Government that while Russia, in the pretended emanc.i.p.ation of a great part of European Turkey by the Treaty of San Stefano, had but acquired a new dependency, England, by insisting on the division of Bulgaria, had baffled this plan and restored to Turkey an effective military dominion over all the country south of the Balkans. That Lord Beaconsfield did well in severing Macedonia from the Slavic State of Bulgaria there is little reason to doubt; that, having so severed it, he did ill in leaving it without a European guarantee for good government, every successive year made more plain; the wisdom of his treatment of Bulgaria itself must, in the light of subsequent events, remain matter for controversy. It may fairly be said that in dealing with Bulgaria English statesmen were, on the whole, dealing with the unknown.
Nevertheless, had guidance been accepted from the history of the other Balkan States, a.n.a.logies were not altogether wanting or altogether remote.
During the present century three Christian States had been formed out of what had been Ottoman territory: Servia, Greece, and Roumania. Not one of these had become a Russian Province, or had failed to develop and maintain a distinct national existence. In Servia an attempt had been made to retain for the Porte the right of keeping troops in garrison. This attempt had proved a mistake. So long as the right was exercised it had simply been a source of danger and disquiet, and it had finally been abandoned by the Porte itself. In the case of Greece, Russia, with a view to its own interests, had originally proposed that the country should be divided into four autonomous provinces tributary to the Sultan: against this the Greeks had protested, and Canning had successfully supported their protest. Even the appointment of an ex-Minister of St. Petersburg, Capodistrias, as first President of Greece in 1827 had failed to bring the liberated country under Russian influence; and in the course of the half-century which had since elapsed it had become one of the commonplaces of politics, accepted by every school in every country of Western Europe, that the Powers had committed a great error in 1833 in not extending to far larger dimensions the Greek Kingdom which they then established. In the case of Roumania, the British Government had, out of fear of Russia, insisted in 1856 that the provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia should remain separate: the result was that the inhabitants in defiance of England effected their union, and that after a few years had pa.s.sed there was not a single politician in England who regarded their union otherwise than with satisfaction. If history taught anything in the solution of the Eastern question, it taught that the effort to reserve for the Sultan a military existence in countries which had pa.s.sed from under his general control was futile, and that the best barrier against Russian influence was to be found not in the division but in the strengthening and consolidation of the States rescued from Ottoman dominions.
It was of course open to English statesmen in 1878 to believe that all that had hitherto pa.s.sed in the Balkan Peninsula had no bearing upon the problems of the hour, and that, whatever might have been the case with Greece, Servia, and Roumania, Bulgaria stood on a completely different footing, and called for the application of principles not based on the experience of the past but on the divinations of superior minds. Should the history of succeeding years bear out this view, should the Balkans become a true military frontier for Turkey, should Northern Bulgaria sink to the condition of a Russian dependency, and Eastern Roumelia, in severance from its enslaved kin, abandon itself to a thriving ease behind the garrisons of the reforming Ottoman, Lord Beaconsfield will have deserved the fame of a statesman whose intuitions, undimmed by the mists of experience, penetrated the secret of the future, and shaped, because they discerned, the destiny of nations. It will be the task of later historians to measure the exact period after the Congress of Berlin at which the process indicated by Lord Beaconsfield came into visible operation; it is the misfortune of those whose view is limited by a single decade to have to record that in every particular, with the single exception of the severance of Macedonia from the Slavonic Princ.i.p.ality, Lord Beaconsfield's ideas, purposes and antic.i.p.ations, in so far as they related to Eastern Europe, have hitherto been contradicted by events. What happened in Greece, Servia, and Roumania has happened in Bulgaria. Experience, thrown to the winds by English Ministers in 1878, has justified those who listened to its voice. There exists no such thing as a Turkish fortress on the Balkans; Bourgas no more belongs to the Sultan than Athens or Belgrade; no Turkish soldier has been able to set foot within the territory whose very name, Eastern Roumelia, was to stamp it as Turkish dominion. National independence, a living force in Greece, in Servia, in Roumania, has proved its power in Bulgaria too.
The efforts of Russia to establish its influence over a people liberated by its arms have been repelled with unexpected firmness. Like the divided members of Roumania, the divided members of Bulgaria have effected their union. In this union, in the growing material and moral force of the Bulgarian State, Western Europe sees a power wholly favourable to its own hopes for the future of the East, wholly adverse to the extension of Russian rule: and it has been reserved for Lord Beaconsfield's colleague at the Congress of Berlin, regardless of the fact that Bulgaria north of the Balkans, not the southern Province, created that vigorous military and political organisation which was the precursor of national union, to explain that in dividing Bulgaria into two portions the English Ministers of 1878 intended to promote its ultimate unity, and that in subjecting the southern half to the Sultan's rule they laid the foundation for its ultimate independence.
[1] Chapters I. to XI. of this Edition.
[2] Chapters XII. to XVIII. of this Edition.
[3] Page 362 of this Edition.
[4] Ranke, Ursprung und Beginn der Revolutionskriege, p. 90, Vivenot, Quellen zur Geschichte der Kaiserpolitik Oesterreichs, i. 185, 208.
[5] Von Sybel, Geschichte der Revolutionszeit, i. 289.
[6] Vivenot, Quellen, i. 372. Buchez et Roux, xiii. 340, xiv. 24.
[7] Hausser, Deutsche Geschichte, i. 88. Vivenot, Herzog Albrecht, i. 78.
[8] Springer, Geschichte Oesterreichs, i. 46.
[9] Pertz, Leben Stein, ii. 402. Paget, Travels in Hungary, i. 131.
[10] Ranke, Ursprung und Beginn, p. 256. Vivenot, Quellen, i. 133, 165. The acquisition of Bavaria was declared by the Austrian Cabinet to be the _summum bonum_ of the monarchy.
[11] Biedermann, Deutschland im Achtzehnten Jahrhundert, iv. 1144.
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