1853-55] THE WARRIOR OF PEACE 215 CHAPTER X THE CRIMEAN WAR 'Alliances are dangerous things. It is an alliance with Turkey that has drawn us into this war. I would not advise alliances with any nation, but I would cultivate friendship with all nations.' 'If this phrase of the "balance of power," the meaning of which nobody can exactly make out, is to be brought in on every occasion to stimulate this country to war, there is an end to all hope of permanent peace.'-BRIGHT in the House of Commons, March 31, 1854. It is an old, wise saying that a man's real character can be judged by his conduct when in love. But perhaps the character of a public man can best be judged when he is opposed to some violent and almost universal passion of his fellow-countrymen. Then will be seen the stuff of which he is made. He may stifle his conscience and take the popular side; or he may retire for awhile from public life; or he may find courage to face the mob by lashing himself into a frenzy of impotent rage, saying everything that will sting, and scorning to say anything that might persuade. But if he aspires to preserve his dignity, both to himself and to the world, if he hopes to emerge when the times change with reputation and influence increased, if at the height of his unpopularity he would fain say words that shall impinge even on the heated brains of the angry multitude, and leave there an impress that shall be permanent when passion has cooled, then he should take for his example the conduct and speeches of John Bright during the Crimean War. The friendship of Cobden and Bright dated from their share in a vast popularity ending in a world-famous triumph. It was now tested and ennobled by the ordeal of a popular hatred proportioned to their former eminence. Because their two names had become a national synonym for the blessing of plentiful bread, they were now once more joined for the nation's curse that is the lot of the peace-lover in time of war. They were the 'traitors,' they were the 'Russians'; Bright was burnt in effigy; he and his friend were caricatured and vilified in the newspapers that had so often praised them; they were abused in the halls of meeting that had resounded with the thunder of their League. The Tory papers joined in the hue and cry, and their old enemies rejoiced to witness the humiliation of the calicoprinter and the cotton-spinner who had dictated terms to the gentlemen of England. When the Conservative is unpopular, he can retire to the clubs and drawing-rooms of the powerful society to which he belongs, and speak there in scorn of the vagaries of the mob, whom in theory he always despises, however much in practice he may play the wooer. But when the Radical is unpopular he is naked to the blast. He may have domestic, but he has no social support or consolation; and he well knows that he is torn by his own hounds, turned out of his own temple. After another generation of men had passed away, on the occasion of Bright's death, Mr. Gladstone delivered his eulogy in the House of Commons, and chose out for special praise his action during the Crimean War. Cobden and Bright, he said, ' had lived upon the confidence, the approval, the applause of the people, and the work of their lives had been to propel the life of public sentiment. Suddenly they came upon a great occasion on which they differed from the majority of their countrymen. At that time it was that, although we had known much of Mr. Bright, we learned something more. We had known his great mental gifts and powers. We had known his courage and consistency. We had known his splendid eloquence, which then was and afterwards came to be acknowledged as the loftiest which had sounded within these walls for generations. But we had not till then known how high the moral tone of these popular leaders had been elevated, and we had not known of the splendid examples they could set to the whole of their contemporaries, and to coming generations, of a readiness to part with all the sympathies and with all the support they had held so dear for the sake of right and conscientious conviction.' Never were two men less egoistic in receipt of praise or blame. In Bright's private letters during the Crimean War, even in those to his wife and sister, and in his journal where he wrote his inmost thoughts, there is to be found no complaint, scarcely indeed a mention, of the bitter things daily said and written against him. In what he writes at this period there is always 1853-55] THE WARRIOR OF PEACE 217 sorrow, and sometimes gloom, but it is grave regret at the public delusion and the ministerial crime; he does not seem to feel the injuries that concern himself. For these Bright had the thickest of skins. He was a prize-fighter who could take punishment' as well as give it. The goad of personal pain' never pricked him to an outcry, still less to a faltering or a desperate step. But in his letters and in his journal he constantly records his gratitude to old friends and old enemies, who came to him, like Nicodemus by night, to tell him they agreed with him against the world; 1 and he is always touched by the tolerance of the House of Commons that crowded in to hear with rapt attention his dirges over the peace they had broken, and his philippics against their idols on the Treasury Bench. Thus under a terrible strain he kept his mind healthy and his temper clear; indeed, it was on this painful question of the Crimea that his oratory reached its highest dignity and perfection. But though he showed complete self-mastery, he suffered so much from the spectacle of his country's selfinflicted woes, that just before the return of peace his health suddenly and totally gave way. To attack the justice and wisdom of a popular war while it is still in progress requires more courage than any other act in a political society that has outgrown the assassin's dagger and the executioner's block. And it requires not only most courage but most power and skill. To perform it well is not only the rarest but one of the most valuable of public services, because to arraign an unjust and unwise war is the only way to prevent another. Bright and Cobden, by speaking out so that they were heard against the Crimean War, while it was yet in progress, were believed when it was over. In this way they did much to prevent England from taking part in the wars of the next twenty years, in every one of which she had as much concern as in the Eastern question of 1854. Had it not been for the lesson which Bright now began to teach in circumstances so unpleasant to himself, it is not improbable that we should have fought for Austria against France in 1859, or for the slaveowners against the North in 1861, or for Denmark against Germany in 1864, or again for Turkey against Russia in 1878. And if we had entered into any one of these wars, or into the 1 E.g. to his sister Mrs. McLaren, 11th Month, 14, 1854: 'I daresay thou hast seen my letter on the war [to Absalom Watkin]. It has made a wonderful row among the newspapers, and with the gossips in Manchester. But it is true and unanswerable. I have had perhaps fifty letters during the week past, approving of it, six at least from clergymen of the Church of England, all of whom were strangers to me!' Franco-German War of 1870, very little more would have been heard of the famous 'Victorian prosperity.' The service that can be rendered by a politician of genius who, eschewing more popular and lucrative functions, will set himself to create opinion in favour of peace, cannot well be overestimated, for every country is in the hands of statesmen and journalists in whom the old leaven of Palmerston and his like is all too slowly dying, while the penalties for actual war are increasing at the accelerated pace of all modern evolution. Such a service was rendered by John Bright. He showed the world how a war can be patriotically denounced, with permanent effects upon opinion in favour of keeping peace. It is indeed no easy art. If he had taken high Quaker' ground, condemning all war, he would have accomplished little. But he never denied the abstract right to take up arms on good occasion, and shortly afterwards proved his good faith by supporting the suppression of the Indian Mutiny and of the slave-owners' secession in America. On the Crimean question he met the wise men of the Foreign Office and of the Treasury Bench on their own ground, and routed them on their own dispatches as reported in their own Blue Books. He showed them, in the mysteries of which they claimed to be high priests, to be the muddlers that such lofty claimants often are. He exposed the wordy superstitions of the Foreign Office for which England gave 30,000 gallant lives of her own, and sacrificed half a million lives of men of other nations, and brought misery and starvation once more to the doors of our people at home. Only the union of a clear understanding of the facts and issues with an oratory as dignified as it was telling in its emotional effects, could have driven home that most needful lesson to the rulers and people of Britain, for a while.1 In the early months of 1853 Prince Menschikoff, on special mission to Constantinople, raised the question of the status of the Greek Church in Turkey. Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the British Minister to the Porte, acting without express authority 1 During the Indian Mutiny, September 1857, Bright wrote to Joseph Sturge: Does our friend Southall think our Government should rest quiet, and allow every Englishman in India to be murdered. I don't think so. They must act on their principles, seeing that they admit no others. I have never advocated the extreme non-resistance principle in public or in private. I don't know whether I would logically maintain it. I opposed the Crimean War as contrary to the national interests and the principles professed and avowed by the nation, and on no other ground. It was because my arguments could not be met that I was charged with being for peace at any price," and by this our opposition to the war was much damaged.' 1853-55] CAUSES OF THE WAR 219 from home, induced the Sultan to reject the Russian proposals. Britain thereby became a principal to this remote quarrel and took the Turkish Empire under her shield. France, the rival of Russia for the Protectorate of Christians in Turkey, made common cause with England. In July a proposed settlement of the points in dispute between Russia and Turkey, called the Vienna note,' was presented to the two parties concerned by England, France, Austria, and Prussia. Russia at once accepted these terms, but Turkey refused them. Her refusal of the settlement proposed to her by Great Britain was secretly prompted by the British Ambassador, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, more warlike than the Cabinet he pretended to serve. Even his apologist, Kinglake, admits that he could not 'hide his real thoughts' about the Vienna note from the Turkish ministers.' Now that Russia had accepted and Turkey refused the British terms, it was our plain duty either to compel Turkey to come into line or else to leave her to face the consequences alone. But alliances' do not permit either justice or expediency to stand in the way of support to the 'ally.' Our first step should have been the withdrawal of Lord Stratford; and if Lord Aberdeen had been master in the Cabinet that bears his name, this would have been done. But the withdrawal of Stratford would have led to the resignation of Palmerston and Russell, and broken up the Government. The Sultan, justly confident that whatever he did France and England would support him in the end, rejected their advice and defied Russia. The Russians had already occupied the Danubian 'Principalities,' Moldavia and Wallachia, which enjoyed an independent status, under Russian protection, beneath the suzerainty of the Porte. Turkey declared war. But serious operations did not commence, and efforts to restore peace were continued by the Powers until, on November 30, 1853, the Russian fleet in the Black Sea destroyed a Turkish squadron in the harbour of Sinope. It was an operation similar to the equally one-sided battle of Navarino a generation before, and if France and England had not on this later occasion espoused the Moslem cause, the battle of Sinope would, like the battle of Navarino, have speedily led to the liberation of large Christian populations from the Turkish yoke.1 But on this second and less The proposals of the Czar Nicholas to England in the first weeks of 1853, had been that the sick man's' property should be divided up; that England might if she wished take Egypt, and that Servia, Bulgaria, and the other provinces of European Turkey should be erected into independent principalities. The proposals sound like a prophecy after the event! Yet we fought |