the guidance of carefully selected British officers. It is a policy which we must take on trust, confiding in our experts. Substantial results are said to have been already obtained, the Chitral expedition having had valuable help from the transport trains organized by the rulers of Gwalior and Jeypoor, and by the troops of the Maharajah of Kashmir. Still for our part we rely with greater confidence in regard to the future on this circumstance, that instead of British troops being in the proportion of less than one to six, as they were in the days before the Mutiny, we have now, or had in 1885 (vol. ii., p. 390), seventy thousand British with four hundred and fourteen guns, and 128,636 natives, a proportion of more than one to two. So long as our trust in native loyalty and professions does not lead us to tamper with this proportion, and to take all the securities which a position, precarious in spite of all our efforts, requires, there can be no political unwisdom in cultivating friendship and inspiring confidence in native States, a policy which we hope will, before many generations have passed away, lead to the introduction of friendly sentiments and civilizing agencies even amongst the hostile tribes who hang like a dark cloud over our north-western frontier.

We lay down these volumes with the feeling that they are the record of the life not only of a brave and capable soldier, but of a loyal friend and of a very kindly and modest-hearted gentleman. When he succeeds, it is his "luck," when others fail, it is their "misfortune." There is not an unkind word from beginning to end, and when an adverse criticism is inevitable, it is free from bitterness, and names are withheld as far as possible. Those who served under him in later life were made to feel that his eye was on them, and that their actions would be appraised in an ungrudging and appreciative spirit. The record of his young days is fresh and full of charm, recalling the bright young officer whose sobriquet of "Bobs" throughout the service was the Indian unerring sign of genial manners and personal popularity. And throughout

his fate" to the hour when he penned its dedication, we have occasional glimpses of the domestic sentiment which Englishmen recognize as the basis of national greatness, and without whose gilding this life of strenuous activity of "Forty-one Years in India" could not be the happy retrospect it is. By such men our Indian empire was won and by such men it must be held.

THE EASTERN CRISIS.

(MR. GLADSTONE TO THE DUKE OF WESTMINSTER.)

My Dear Duke of Westminster: Had we at the present date been in our ordinary relation of near neighborhood, you would have run no risk of being addressed by me in print without your previous knowledge or permission. But the present position of the Eastern question is peculiar. Transactionssuch only for the moment I am content to call them-have been occurring in the East at short intervals during the last two years of such a nature as to stir our common humanity from its innermost recesses and to lodge a trustworthy appeal from the official to the personal conscience. Until the most recent dates these transactions had seemed to awaken no echo save in England, but now a light has flashed at least upon western Europe and an uneasy consciousness that nations as well as cabinets are concerned in what has been and is going on has taken strong hold upon the public mind, and the time seems to have come when men should speak or be forever silent.

My ambition is for rest, and rest alone. But every grain of sand is part of the seashore, and, connected as I have been, for nearly half a century, with the Eastern question, often when in positions of responsibility, I feel that inclination does not suffice to justify silence. In yielding to this belief I keep another conviction steadily in view, namely, that to infuse into this discussion the spirit or language of party would be to give a cover and

an apology to every sluggish and unmanly mind for refusing to offer its tribute to a common cause, and I have felt that, taking into view the attitude you have consistently held in our domestic politics during the last decade of years, I can offer to my countrymen of all opinions no more appropriate guarantee of my careful fidelity to this conviction than, if only by the exercise of an unusual freedom, to place the expressions of my views under shelter of your name.

It is more easy thus to forego the liberty and license of partisanship because it is my firm inward belief that the deplorable position which the concerted action or non-action of the powers of Europe has brought about and maintained has been mainly due, not to a common accord but to a waut of it; that the unwise and mistaken views of some of the powers have brought dishonor upon the whole, and that when the time comes for the distribution with full knowledge of praise and blame it will not be on the British government or on those in sympathy with it that the heaviest sentence of condemnation will descend. Let us succinctly review the situation.

The Armenian massacres, judiciously interspersed with intervals of breathing time, have surpassed in their scale and in the intensity and diversity of their wickedness all modern, if not all historical experience. All this was done under the eyes of six powers, who were represented by their ambassadors, and who thought their feeble verbiage a sufficient counterpoise to the instruments of death, shame, and torture, provided if in framing it they all chimed in with one another. Growing in confidence with each successive triumph of deeds over words, and having exhausted in Armenia every expedient of deliberate and wholesale wickedness, the sultan, whom I have not scrupled to call the Great Assassin, recollected that he had not yet reached his climax. It yet remained to show to the powers and their ambassadors, under their own eyes and within the hearing of their own ears, in Constan

tinople itself, what their organs were too dull to see and hear.

From amid the fastnesses of the Armenian hills to this height of daring he boldly ascended, and his triumph was not less complete than before. They did, indeed, make bold to interfere with his prerogatives by protecting or exporting some Armenians who would otherwise have swelled the festering heaps of those murdered in the streets of Constantinople, but as to punishment, reparation, or even prevention, the world has yet to learn that any one of them was effectually cared for. Every extreme of wickedness is sacrosanct when it passes in Turkish garb. All comers may, as in a tournament of old, be challenged to point to any two years of diplomatic history which have been marked by more glaring inequality of forces; by more uniform and complete success of weakness combined with wrong over strength associated with right, of which it had, unhappily, neither consciousness nor confidence; by so vast an aggregation of blood-red records of massacre, or by so profound a disgrace inflicted upon and still clinging as a shirt of Nessus to collective Europe.

All these terrible occurrences the six powers appear to treat as past and gone, as dead and buried. They forget that every one of them will revive in history, to say nothing of a higher record still, and in proceeding calmly to handle those further developments of the great drama which are now in progress they appear blissfully unconscious that at every step they take they are treading on the burning cinders of the Armenian massacres. To inform and sway the public mind amid the disastrous confusions of the last two years there have been set up as supreme and guiding ideas those expressed firstly in the phrase "The Concert of Europe," and secondly "The Integrity of the Turkish Empire."

Of these phrases

the first denotes an instrument indescribably valuable where it can be made available for purposes of good, but it is an instrument only, and as such it must be tried by the question

of adaptation to its ends. When it can be made subservient to the purposes of honor, duty, liberty, and humanity it has the immense and otherwise unattainable advantage of leaving the selfish aims of each power to neutralize and destroy one another, and of acting with resistless force for such objects as will bear the light.

In the years 1876-80 it was the influence of England in European diplomacy which principally distracted the concert of the powers. In determining the particulars of the Treaty of Berlin she made herself conspicuous by taking the side least favorable to liberty in the East. In that state of things I for one used my best exertions to set up a European concert. In public estimation it would at least have qualified our activity in the support of Turkey, which had then sufficiently displayed her iniquitous character and policy in Bulgaria, though she has since surpassed herself.

and

When the ministry of 1880 came into power we made it one of our first objects to organize a European concert for the purpose of procuring the fulfilment of two important provisions of the treaty of 1878, referring to Montenegro and to Greece, respectively. Fair and smiling were the first results of our endeavors. The forces of suasion had been visibly exhausted the emblems of force were accordingly displayed, a squadron consisting ships of war carrying the flags of each of the powers being speedily gathered on the Montenegrin or Albanian coast. But we soon discovered that for several of the powers "concert of Europe" bore a signification totally at variance with that which we attached to it, and that it included toy demonstrations which might be made under a condition that they should not pass into reality.

of

We did not waste our time in vain endeavors to galvanize a corpse, but framed a plan for the seizure of an important port of the sultan's dominions. To this we confidently believed that some of the powers would accede, and in concert with these we prepared to

go forward. It hardly needs be said that we found our principal support in wise and brave Alexander II., who then reigned over Russia. Still less need it be specified that there was no war in Europe, though, doubtless, this bugbear would have been used for intimidation had our proceedings passed beyond the stage of privacy; but the effect was perfect-the effect produced, be it observed, on Abdul Hamid, on him who has since proved himself to be the great assassin. Our plan became known to the sultan, and without our encountering a single serious difficulty Montenegro obtained the considerable extension which she now enjoys and Thessaly was added to Greece.

But as nothing can be better, nay, nothing so good, as the "concert of Europe," where it can be made to work; so, as the best when in its corruption always changes to the worst, nothing can be more mischievous than the pretence to be working with this tool when it is not really in working order. The concert of Europe then comes to mean the concealment of dissents, the lapse into generalities, and the settling down upon negations at junctures when duty loudly calls for positive action. Lord Granville was the mildest of men, but mildness may keep company with resolution, and we have seen how he dealt with the "concert of Europe." Very brief inter-communications enable a man of common sense to see in cases where the principles involved are clear whether there is a true concert. But the mischief of setting up a false one is immense. Let us look at it in some of its aspects.

First the criminal at once becomes aware of it, and sets to work to flatter and seduce the power he may have reason to suppose best inclined. Secondly, what is the composition of the body? A cabinet can work together because it has a common general purpose, and this purpose has a unifying effect on particular questions as they arise. but the powers of Europe have no such common purpose to bring them together. Lastly, and what is worst of all, this pretended and ineffectual co

operation of governments shuts out the peoples. It is from this mischief that we are now suffering. It is difficult enough for a people to use ad hoc e sufficient influence over its own government standing single, but what is our case when we find ourselves standing in the face of our government with five other governments behind it, which we cannot call to account and over which we cannot reasonably expect to exercise the smallest influence? It is time to speak with freedom.

At this moment two great States with a European population of one hundred and forty or perhaps one hundred and fifty millions, are under the government of two young men, each bearing the high title of emperor, but in one case wholly without knowledge or experience; in the other, having only such knowledge and experience, in truth limited enough, as have excited much astonishment and some consternation when an inkling of them has been given to the world. In one case the government is a pure and perfect despotism, and in the other equivalent to it in matters of foreign policy, so far as it can be understood in a land where freedom is indigenous, familiar, and full grown. These powers, so far as their sentiments are known, have been using their power in the concert to fight steadily against freedom. But why are we to have our government pinned to their aprons? The sense of this nation is for them non-existent, and the German emperor would well within his limits should he deign to say to us: "Turkey I know, and the concert I know, but who are ye?"

lie

At the heels of this concert we have plodded patiently for two years, and what has it done for us-done for us, not in promoting justice and humanity for that question has long ago been answered, but in securing peace? I affirm that with all its pretension and its power it has worsened and not bettered the situation. When we pointed to the treaty obligations and treaty rights which solemnly and separately bound us to stop the Armenian massacres, we were threatened, by the credulity of

Well, intimidation of this kind carried the day, and to the six powers, in their majesty and might, with their armies numbered by millions of men, and resources measured by hundreds of millions of pounds a year, was intrusted the care of the public peace. It was not a very difficult task. There was not a real breath of war in the air two years and one year ago. Now Turkey has a casus belli against Greece. Greece has a casus belli against the powers. Turkey may have one against them, too, were it to her interest to raise it. So far as Turkey and Greece are concerned, this is no mere abstraction, and Europe flutters from day to day with anxiety to know whether there is or is not war on the Thessalian frontier. It is surely time that we should have done, at least for the present occasion, with the gross and palpable delusion, under which alone can we hope for any effectual dealing by a European concert with the present crisis in the East. It is time to shake off the incubus and to remember, as in days of old, that we have an existence, a character, and a duty of our own.

But then we are told by the German emperor and others that we can only have reforms in Turkey on the condition of maintaining the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. At one time this phrase had a meaning and was based upon a theory-a theory propounded by men of such high authority as Lord Palmerston and Lord Stratford de Redcliffe. It was that Turkey, if only she were sheltered by European power from the hostility of her neighbor, was alike disposed and competent to enter into the circle of the civilized powers. The shelter prayed for was assured by the Crimean war. After the peace of Paris in 1856 she enjoyed twenty years of absolute immunity from foreign alarms. In no point or particular save