Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 131.djvu/421

Rh rule of the Turk must cease in every land whose inhabitants had risen against his rule. I said that, as Bosnia and Herzegovina had risen, his rule must at once cease in Bosnia and Herzegovina; that when Albania and Bulgaria should rise, his rule must cease in Albania and Bulgaria also. I said that the least that could be accepted was the practical setting free of the revolted lands by making them tributary states like Servia and Roumania. But I also proposed, in the special interest of the large Mahometan minority in Bosnia, that that particular province should be annexed to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, as a power strong enough to hinder the professors of either religion from doing any wrong to the professors of the other. When I said this, there was still only a local warfare in two provinces, a warfare waged by the people of those provinces, goaded to revolt by intolerable wrongs, and strengthened only by private volunteers from the lands immediately around them. It was not till several months later that there was any Bulgarian insurrection, any national war on the part of Servia and Montenegro. Meanwhile the Turk was engaged in his usual work of putting forth lying promises, promises in which the men who had arisen against him were far too wise to put trust for a moment. Meanwhile diplomatists were engaged in their usual work of pooh-poohing the great events whose greatness they could not understand. They were busy with their usual nostrums, their petty palliatives, their Andrassy notes and their Berlin memorandums. Feeble attempts indeed to stop the torrent were their proposals for this and that reform, for this and that guaranty. Such were the sops which they thought might be swallowed either by the tyrant whose one object was to get back his victims into his clutches, or by the men who had sworn to die rather than again bow their heads under his yoke. While diplomatists were wondering and pottering, men were acting. Servia and Montenegro at last came openly to the help of their brethren, and helpless ambassadors and foreign secretaries found themselves face to face with a national war and no longer with a local insurrection. And meanwhile, if men had been acting, fiends had been acting also. Bulgaria rose; how its rising was put down the world knows, in spite of the self-made Earl of Beaconsfield. And, when the world knew, the world shuddered and the world spoke. It had been hard to call public attention to what seemed to many merely a petty strife in lands whose names they had hardly heard. The old traditions also had to be struggled with. Englishmen had to be taught what their dear ally the Turk was, what he had ever been, what he ever must be. The "Russian hobgoblin" had to be laid, and with many minds it was hard work to lay it. For months and months the few who had their eyes open were still preaching in the wilderness. At last the Turk did our work for us. He told a shuddering world what he really was in words stronger than any that we could put together. He painted his own picture on the bloody fields of Bulgaria in clearer colors than we could have painted it. The common heart of mankind was stirred. We who had before been preaching in the wilderness found a hearing in market-places and in council-chambers. What we had whispered in the ear in closets was now preached on the housetops by a mighty company of preachers. Great statesmen put forth with voice and pen the same facts, the same arguments, for which, nine months before, it was hard to get a hearing. All England spoke with one voice, a voice which spoke in the same tones in every corner of the land save two. It was only from the beer-shops of Oxford and the Foreign Office at Westminster that discordant notes came up. While the rest of England was speaking the words of truth and righteousness, Lord Derby was still putting forth fallacies, while his Oxford admirers raised an inarticulate howl which was not more unreasonable than the fallacies of their chief. Those who, in season and out of season, have fought this battle for twenty years and more, may perhaps be indulged in a little feeling of triumph when they see that the world has at last come round to their side. England, so long the abettor of the Turk, has at last found out what the Turk is. The nation has awakened from its slumber; it has cast away its fetters; it has dared to open its eyes and to use its reason; it has declared as one man that England will no longer have a share in maintaining that foul fabric of wrong, that Englishmen will put up with nothing short of the deliverance of the brethren against whom they have, as a nation, so deeply sinned.

The people of England have spoken; but it is not enough that the people should speak. Their rulers must be made to act; and just now we have rulers whom it is very hard to goad to action — at all events to action on behalf of right. The Times says that Lord Derby must be "educated,"