Disraeli, Gladstone & the Eastern Question

R. W Seton-Watson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136244049
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Published in the year 2004, Disraeli, Gladstone & the Eastern Question is a valuable contribution to the field of History.

CHAPTER I

DISRAELI AND THE NEW IMPERIALISM

FOUR times in the last hundred years has the so-called Eastern Question involved Europe in a crisis of the first magnitude. In 1854 it led to a war of the three Western Powers and Turkey against Russia—a war which the allies did everything in their power to make universal by involving Austria and Prussia also, and which only remained localised because of the hesitant policy of Vienna and Berlin. Twenty years later troubles in Bosnia involved first Serbia, then Russia, in conflict with Turkey, and more than once a general war seemed imminent. In 1908 the Bosnian question again became a European issue, and war between the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente was only narrowly averted. Finally in 1912 and 1914 there were fresh turns of the Balkan kaleidoscope, and the catastrophe so long feared was precipitated by a quarrel which centred in the Near East. Four years of a World War altered the Eastern Question out of all recognition, but even to-day some of the poison engendered by it is still working in the veins of Europe.

There are many aspects from which these tragedies can be considered, but there are two which deserve especial attention. The more closely they are studied, the more conscious do we become of the extent to which the political, racial and economic issues of the modern world have become interwoven and interlocked, until it is scarcely possible to name any question, seemingly, of internal politics in one country which may not, under force of circumstances, become a cause of international complications. Early in the Great War the late Lord Morley expressed to me his grief and horror at the idea that Lancashire lads should die in Flanders and Thrace because a Bosnian Serb had murdered an Austrian Archduke: and even then it seemed to me strange that a philosopher and historian of his calibre should have been so blind to a process which has been increasingly at work for a whole century, and to which the railway, the telegraph, the telephone, the motor-car and the airship have given added impulse. Horrible indeed it is that the sons of one nation should perish in a quarrel which was perhaps started in another hemisphere, which in no way concerned them, and of which they did not know the very elements. In 1934 there are many who loudly asseverate that the Austrian, or Danubian, or Polish or Ukrainian question in no way concerns the British Empire and may be ignored by it. Yet at any moment one of these questions, or others not yet even visible on the horizon, may swiftly and inexorably involve Europe, against its will and without all possibility of choice. For that is “the way of the world”, and will continue to be so until mankind consents to apply religion or ethics to politics and can find a substitute for war.

A second and still more practical aspect is the extent to which these issues are determined by public opinion, elemental, unreasoning, sweeping away the leaders of a nation and raising new idols to power. In the first of the four instances quoted, the Crimean War, public opinion in Britain radically misjudged the facts and was positively hysterical in its outbursts: and the result was a war which posterity agrees in regarding as the most superfluous in our modern annals. New classes of the nation, vocal for the first time and incapable of judging the niceties of foreign policy, swept the Government and the Crown off their feet: and in the process men like Cobden and Bright, who a few years earlier had won an overwhelming popular victory, found themselves isolated and exposed to fierce obloquy. In the second instance, the Eastern crisis of the seventies, it was again public opinion which exercised the decisive influence, but this time it was split into two closely balanced sections which neutralised one another, and in the end the Government, which had sometimes fanned opinion into flame, hesitated and drew back from the very brink of war.

These two classic instances should provide us to all time with a warning against the dangers of allowing foreign policy to become a catchword of internal party politics. Lord Salisbury was not exaggerating when he pointed out, on his return from the Congress of Berlin, that no question had within the memory of man “so deeply excited the English people, moved their passions so thoroughly and produced such profound divisions and such rancorous animosity”. Even after the lapse of half a century it should be profitable to explore this field and to examine the theses of rival statesmen and propagandists. The path is strewn with warnings which may still be taken to heart.

THE RETURN OF THE CONSERVATIVES

THE advent of the Conservatives to power in 1874, as the result of a decisive victory at the polls, forms a landmark in foreign policy. It ends the long and not very edifying period of isolation and nonintervention during which immense changes took place on the Continent, without this country seeming able to exercise any very noticeable influence in one direction or the other. This deliberate abstention from Continental affairs had since 1865 been equally the policy of both the great political parties. At earlier periods each in turn had pursued an active policy in Europe, though the methods adopted to this end had varied very greatly under Castlereagh, under Canning and under Palmerston. Since the Crimean War, the responsibility for which must be shared by every section of political opinion, it was the Tories who had been most chary of anything savouring of intervention. That it was the Conservatives who now broke away from their former traditions and entered for a time upon what in our own day is sometimes labelled as “activism”, was above all due to the personality of Benjamin Disraeli, who had at length overcome the suspicious reserves of the Tory aristocracy, and stood forth as their acknowledged leader, displaying qualities of restless energy and still more of vivid imagination, such as differentiated him from most British statesmen. These he unquestionably owed to his Jewish blood, from which only too often spiteful deductions have been drawn, but whose significance can scarcely be exaggerated, even if we do not accept the deliberate overstatement of one of his novels, “Race is everything, there is no other truth”. In his first elation and surprise he himself described the new Government as “the strongest since Pitt”:¹ but he was now in his seventieth year, racked with gout and asthma, and he pathetically reminded his admirers: “Power has come to me too late. There were days when on waking I felt I could move dynasties and governments: but that has passed away.”²

It is a commonplace of history that Disraeli introduced the Imperial conception of affairs and assigned to our expanding Empire for the first time the attention and sympathy that were its due. The international situation which confronted him was radically different from that which prevailed when he first became Prime Minister. The old balance on the Continent had been overthrown, France was under temporary eclipse, Italy was still a negligible quantity. Germany was not merely preponderant, but more closely allied than ever to the other two Imperial Courts: and thus Britain found herself in a position of uncomfortable isolation, faced by what some regarded as the old Holy Alliance in a thinly disguised form.

BRITAIN AND RUSSIA IN CENTRAL ASIA

Meanwhile our eastern policy was suffering a sea change in more than one direction. The great transformation wrought in sea communications gave a growing importance to Egypt as the key to the nearest route to India, and it was no longer possible to be indifferent—or even hostile, as Palmerston had been to the last, and Disraeli as a younger man—to the achievement of the Suez Canal and its control by a French company. At the same time the steady advance of Russia in Central Asia was regarded with grave anxiety both by students of Indian affairs and by members of the Viceroy’s Council. The vast regions stretching from the Caspian to the Tian Shan and Pamir ranges were inhabited by backward and fanatical Turkoman tribes, professing Islam and governed by rival Khans and Emirs. General Kauffmann, the most famous of Russia’s military administrators, was appointed Governor of Turkestan in 1867, and already in the following year reduced Samarkand and Bokhara to submission, thus making Russia the immediate neighbour of Afghanistan on the south-east. In 1873 the advance was resumed by the subjection of Khiva, and two years later the fall of Khokand marked the final stage. Thus within a quarter of a century Russia had pushed forward her frontiers 700 miles to the south and 900 miles to the south-east!¹

To-day it is no longer possible to deny that the Russian advance ended a corrupt and altogether effete régime, and, by letting air and light into regions that had been hermetically sealed for centuries, was a real gain for civilisation. This was treated as incontrovertible even by that noted Russophobe, Arminius Vámbéry, who, disguised as a Moslem pilgrim, saw with his own eyes the hideous cruelties practised by the native rulers of Khiva and Samarkand. But to many contemporaries this fact was still obscured by all too recent memories of Russian repression in Poland and intervention in Hungary and by ugly tales of religious persecution. To those again who looked through Anglo-Indian eyes the advance seemed a serious menace to India, not so much directly—for the idea that the Russians could invade India with adequate, or even inadequate, forces, by such a route as Kashgar and the high Pamirs, was really too grotesque for all but monomaniacs—but indirectly by reducing Persia and Afghanistan to the position of vassal or dependent states. Afghanistan in particular, lacked clearly defined frontiers, and after the death of Dost Mohammed in 1865 fell into a state of latent disorder which seemed to foreshadow dissolution. Lawrence, who was Viceroy till 1868, consistently upheld the view that the establishment of order and culture by Russia was preferable to the survival of unrest and anarchy in such wide regions: and both he and his successor, Lord Mayo, would have welcomed a definite understanding between the two countries as to their respective spheres of influence. Conversations took place in 1869 between Clarendon and Brunnov, and resulted in a suggestion from Prince Gorchakov that a neutral zone should be formed between the two Empires, and an assurance that the Tsar himself regarded Afghanistan as “completely outside the sphere” of Russian influence. Early in 1873 it was agreed that the Oxus should form the northern line, and the Tsar denied any intention of taking Khiva. But he had undertaken more than he could fulfil. Khiva under its Khan was no better than a den of robbers and a centre of slavery: occupation was well-nigh inevitable, and even so prominent a Russophobe as Sir Henry Rawlinson proclaimed the impossibility of subsequent withdrawal, without endangering the whole achievement of the preceding decades. It was the same inevitable process which had determined the piecemeal advance of the British in India. Indeed, it was pointed out at the time, that Napier’s conquest of Scinde was carried out under almost identical conditions, for it took place in spite of the unanimous disapproval of Sir Robert Peel and his Cabinet (of which Gladstone was then a member), but it created a situation which it was found impossible to reverse.

The fact, then, that Khiva was annexed within less than a year of the assurance referred to above was not merely a striking proof that two rival currents existed at the Russian Court, but provided considerable excuse for the suspicions which now began to dominate the Viceroy’s Council. One of its most active members, Sir Bartle Frere, was thoroughly infected by the Russophobia which Sir Henry Rawlinson had learnt as envoy to Persia and lost no chance of preaching to the authorities at home. Meanwhile the fall of Khiva had a magical effect upon the Amir, Shere Ali, who gravitated more and more towards Russia: and the wild language used by certain Russian officers in books¹ and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• Chapter I: Disraeli and the New Imperialism
• Chapter II: The Eastern Crisis
• Chapter III: The Bulgarian Atrocities
• Chapter IV: The Conference of Constantinople
• Chapter V: The Battle in Parliament
• Chapter VI: The Russo-Turkish War
• Chapter VII: The Growth of Cabinet Dissensions
• Chapter VIII: The Final Breach
• Chapter IX: Salisbury at the Foreign Office
• Chapter X: The Congress of Berlin
• Chapter XI: The Treaty of Berlin and its Results
• Chapter XII: “Peace with Honour”: From Berlin to Midlothian
• Epilogue: A Confrontation: Disraeli, Derby, Salisbury, Gladstone
• General Index
• Index to Quotations from Unpublished Sources
• Map: The Settlement of Berlin