Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/731

1885.] === THE IRONY OF KISMET. ===

If anything has seemed certain for the last seven or eight years regarding the power and importance of European and Asiatic States, it is that Turkey has dwindled, and been forced so low as to have become of utter insignificance. Misgoverned, beaten, bankrupt, the Ottoman Empire has continued to exist, not because it was able to maintain itself, but because its extinction, the gap that it would leave, threatens to be so inconvenient, that the presence of the exhausted State is preferred to the unknown ills which might present themselves if it were not. So Europe has agreed that there shall be a Turkey on sufferance – a shorn, contemned, impecunious, and submissive Turkey. The Ottoman State has been her own enemy in the first place; but the nations have been hostile to her too, and very forward in hostility has been Britain of late years, denouncing and reviling her, and setting her enemies upon her. Nobody in these islands thought, probably, that Turkey could ever again be of any account; she was only a thing to thank God on.

But, somehow, as if to teach us how valueless are our dispositions and forecasts, and how enduring are great national tendencies, we see Turkey, not by any action of her own, but by the operation of forces which none of us can control, raising her head once more as a nation not utterly insignificant – as one whose alliance may be well worth securing. Such a state of things might easily have been foreseen, if we had not been wilfully and obstinately blind to the perception of it; for the elements out of which it has arisen are neither new nor hard to be discovered. Turkey has a natural enemy who is also England's natural enemy and rival. She (that is, Turkey) is conveniently situated, and possesses many facilities – among the rest a numerous and brave army for making herself felt on that enemy's frontier, if she had but the sinews of war wherewith to make her other advantages available: but these sinews she has not.

On the other hand, England, having the same natural enemy, cannot, for geographical reasons, easily make an impression on that enemy's frontier. Though she possesses money, ships, arms, ammunition, stores, and brain-power to direct an attack, she is short of the man-power, without which all her other qualities are unavailing. She has got just what Turkey wants. Turkey has got just what Britain wants. Together they can assail, with excellent chance of success, their common foe. Thus, in this regard, Turkey is the complement of England. These things being so, are not the two nations pressed by a power of gravitation, as it were, to act together? The instinct of self-preservation must impel both of them in that direction. We have Russia at the very gates of British India; Turkey has Russia on more than one frontier, watching only, as Turkey well knows, a favourable opportunity of taking another slice of the Ottoman Empire, perhaps Constantinople itself.

The Turkish army, paid, clad, armed, and partly officered by the British, could attack Russia on the coasts of the Black Sea and on the Armenian frontier. This would weaken, perhaps paralyse, the Russian advance on Afghanistan,