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The

'Of remaining fractions of European Turkey the island of Crete has long been one of the least patient under the yoke. hopelessness of the Cretan case is manifested by a long series of rebellions, in which the islanders, though single-handed, engaged themselves against the whole strength of the Ottoman empire in a struggle of life and death for deliverance."

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The revolts of 1831, 1841, 1858, 1866-8, 1877-8, 1889, and fi nally 1896, are then referred to; and the letter goes on: "It is not in human nature, except under circumstances of grinding and destructive oppression, to renew a struggle so unequal. This simple aggregate of the facts, presented in outline, once for all convicts the central power and shows that it has no title to retain its sanguinary and ineffectual dominion. It is needless to go further. We are really dealing with a res judicata, for, though not of their own free will, the six powers have taken into their own hands the pacification of the island and the determination of its future. But we must not suppose that we owe this intervention to a recrudescence of spirit and courage in counsels that had hitherto resulted in a concert of miserable poltroonery.

66

A new actor, governed by a new temper, has appeared upon the stage; not one equipped with powerful fleets, large armies, and boundless treasuries, supplied by uncounted millions, but a petty power, hardly counted in the list of European states, suddenly takes its place midway in the conflict between Turkey and its Cretan insurgents. But it is a power representing the race that had fought the battles of Thermoplyæ and Salamis and had hurled back the hordes of Asia from European shores. In the heroic age of Greece, as Homer tells us, there was a champion who was small of stature but full of fight. He had in his little body a great soul, and he seems to have been reproduced in the recent and marvellously gallant action of Greece.

"It is sad to reflect that we have also before us the reverse of the picture in the six powers, who offer to the world the most conspicuous example of the reverse, and present to us a huge body animated, or rather tenanted, by a feeble heart. We have then before us, it is literally true, a David facing six Goliaths.

Nor is Greece so easily disposed of as might have been anticipated; and what the world seems to understand is this: that there is life in the Cretan matter, that this life has been infused into it exclusively by Grecian action, and that if, under the merciful providence of God and by paths which it is hard as yet to trace, the island is to find her liberation, that inestimable boon will be owing, not to any of the great governments of Europe, for they are paralyzed by dissension, nor even to any of the great peoples of Europe, for the door is shut in their faces by the concert of Europe,' but to the small and physically insignificant race known as the Greeks. Whatever good shall be permitted to emerge from the existing chaos will lie to their credit and to theirs alone.

"Is it to be wondered at that Greece should have endeavored to give aid to the Cretans? As often as they rise in rebellion and their efforts, due to Turkish blindness and bad faith, are encountered by lawless cruelty, they fly in crowds to Greece, which is their only refuge; and that poor country has to stand, and stand alone, between them and starvation. As to their Turkish masters, it is not to be expected that they should find any cause for uneasiness in such a state of things, for, ever since that evil day, the darkest perhaps in the whole known history of humanity, when their star, reeking with gore, rose above the horizon, has it not been their policy and constant aim

to depopulate the regions which they ruled? The title of Turkey de jure is, in truth, given up on all hands. In the meagre catalogue of things which the six united powers have done, there is this, at least, included, that they have taken out of the hands of the sultan the care and administration of the island.

"If Turkey has the proper rights of a governing power, every act they have done and are doing and their presence in Canea itself is a gross breach of international law. It is the violence, cruelty, and perfidy of Ottoman rule which alone give them any title to interfere. The intention which has been announced on their behalf, an announcement incredible but true, is that when the Greek forces should have left the island the Turkish soldiery, the proved butchers of Armenia, the same body and very probably the same corps and persons were to remain as guardians of order in the island. But the six powers have no more right than I have either to confer or to limit this commission unless the sultan by his misconduct has forfeited his right to rule. Autonomy, too, being announced for Crete, and not by his authority but by theirs, Crete being thus derelict in point of lawful sovereignty, does all reversionary care for it fall to the six powers? Are we really to commence our twentieth century under the shadow of a belief that conventions set up by the policy of the moment are everything, and that community of blood, religion, history, sympathy, and interest are nothing?

"How stands the case of Crete in relation to Greece? Do what you will by the might of brute power, a man's a man for a' that;' and in respect of everything that makes a man to be a man, every Cretan is a Greek. Ottoman rule in Crete is a thing of yesterday; but Crete was part of Greece, the Cretan people of the Greek people, at least three thousand years ago; nor have the moral and human ties between them ever been either broken or relaxed; and in the long years and centuries to come, when this bad dream of Ottoman dominion shall have passed away from Europe, that union will still subsist and cannot but prevail, as long as a human heart beats in a human bosom.

In the midst of high and self-sacrificing enthusiasm the Greek government and people have shown their good sense in pleading that the sense of the people of Crete, not the momentary and partial sense, but that which is deliberate and general, should be considered. The Greeks have placed themselves upon a ground of indestructible strength. They are quite right in declining to stand upon an abstract objection to the suzerainty of Turkey if it so pleases the powers. Why should not Crete be autonomously united with Greece and yet not detached in theory from the body of the Ottoman empire? Such an arrangement would not be without example. Bosnia and Herzegovina are administered by Austria; but I apprehend that they have never been formally severed from the overlordship of the sultan. Cyprus is similarly administered by Great Britain; and European history is full of cases in which paramount or full sovereignty in one territory has been united with secondary or subordinate lordship in another.

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"But in thus indicating a possible solution I claim for it no authority. I exclude no other alternative compatible with the principles which have been established by the situation. These I take to be that, by the testimony alike of living authority and of facts, Turkish rule in Crete exists only as a shadow of the past and has no place in the future; and that there is no organ upon earth, subject to inde

pendent provisions on behalf of the minority, so competent or so well entitled to define a prospective position for the people as that people itself.

"Further, it remains to be recognized that at the present juncture Greece, whom some seem disposed to treat as a criminal and disturber, has by her bold action conferred a great service upon Europe. She has made it impossible to palter with this question as we paltered with the blood-stained question of Armenia. She has extricated it from the meshes of diplomacy, and placed it on the order of the day for definitive solution. I can remember no case in which so small a state has conferred so great a benefit.

"As to the notion that Greece is to be coerced and punished, I hardly like to sully the page on which I write by the mention of an alternative so detestable. It would be about as rational to transport the Greek nation, who are in this as one man, to Siberia by what I believe is called an administrative order. If any one has such a scheme of policy to propose, I advise his proposing it anywhere rather than in England.

"Let it be borne in mind that in this unhappy business all along, under the cover of the concert of Europe,' power and speech have been the monopoly of the governments and their organs, while the people have been shut out. Give us at length both light and air. The nations of Europe are in very various stages of their training; but I do not believe there is a European people whose judgment, could it be had, would ordain or tolerate the infliction of punishment upon Greece for the good deed she has recently performed. Certainly it would not be the French, who so largely contributed to the foundation of the kingdom; nor the Italians, still so mindful of what they and their fathers have undergone; and, least of all, I will say, the English, to whom the air of freedom is the very breath of their nostrils, who have already shown in every way open to them how they are minded, and who, were the road now laid open to them by a dissolution of parliament, would show it by returning a parliament which upon that question would speak with unanimity."

Up to the present, the nearest approach to anything in the nature of a reply from Lord Salisbury to Mr. Gladstone's letter is found in the premier's defense of his policy against the attack of Lord Kimberley.

After repeating that "the federated action of Europe is the sole hope of escaping from the constant terror of the calamity of war," Lord Salisbury goes on to say:

"Treaties must not be treated like waste paper, to be torn asunder at will. They must not be overthrown by the mere will of an outside power. Whatever measures the federation of Europe may in the future think right to take with respect to the integrity of Turkey, England will not be a party to a violation of her integrity, as it is by the most solemn congresses and negotiations-which should have impressed their value upon every mind-that the policy England has persistently pursued was founded."

It is urged by the defenders of the government that the withdrawal of England from the concert would be the withdrawal of the only moderating influence in European diplomacy, and would amount to a practical abandonment of the Greeks, as well as of the Armenians and other suffering subjects of the Porte, to the tender mercies of military despots.

The Present Outlook in Crete.-The critical situation at the end of March, on the Thessalian border, renders all statements under this heading necessarily provisional. The breaking out of war would at once undo the present blockade of Crete under the rules of international law; and might break up also the concert of Europe by leaving each of the powers free to choose for itself its line of action, in which case popular sentiment in those countries where democratic tendencies prevail, especially England and France, could not be expected to endorse a continuance of the coercive policy against Greece undertaken by the united powers for the sole purpose of averting war. In that case we might expect some readjustment of the present system of continental alliances. There are already rumors of a secret understanding between Greece and one or more of the powers (Russia or England), of which Greece's long-continued attitude of practical defiance to Europe would seem to justify the suspicion; and there are even hints of negotiations looking to a rehabilitation of the old Dreikaiserbund, or alliance of the three emperors, between Russia, Germany, and Austria, in which case the present scheme of a Dual and a Triple Alliance would be supplanted by one more in accord with natural logical principles, the tendencies of popular sentiment, and the genius of advancing civilization. But none of these suggestions is yet more than a rumor, and we must avoid losing our way by wandering into the tortuous Eastern labyrinth.

Behind the thrusts and parries of diplomatic procedure, there are undoubtedly at work unseen influences whose strength we have no means of measuring-such as the influence of the banking houses of the Rothschilds and the Bleichröders, who hold most of the bonds of Turkey and Greece respectively and wield an immense power in London, Paris, and Berlin; the influence of personal and family ties, which, in the present case, bring Greece into the closest of relations with Russia, England, and Germany; and, perhaps stronger yet than all others, the influence of secret political ambitions which watchfully bide their time.

In view of the stress which has been laid in some quarters upon the influence of family ties as determining the attitudes of certain powers in the present crisis-a stress which is apparently not justified by facts-the following particulars regarding the royal family of Greece will be of interest:

GEORGE I., King of Greece, was born December 24, 1845, son of the present king of Denmark, Christian IX., and brother of the Princess of Wales and the dowager empress of Russia. He was elected king of Greece in 1863 on the death of King Otto, who was childless. The crown had first been offered to Queen Victoria's second son, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, now Duke of Saxe-Coburg, but was declined. King George married in 1867 the Grand Duchess Olga of Russia, daughter of Grand Duke Constantine, grand uncle of the present czar; and thus increased the favor which he had already won in the eyes of the Greeks, by marrying a member of their own religious faith, though he himself was a Protestant. Six childrenfive sons and one daughter-were born of the marriage. The eldest son, the Crown Prince Constantine, Duke of Sparta, born in 1868, married in 1889 Princess Sophia of Prussia, sister of the present German emperor and therefore a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Prince George, the second son, is about twenty-seven years of age and of herculean physique, and is a captain in the Greek navy. In May, 1891, it will be remembered, he accompanied the present czar, Nicholas-then the czarowitz-in his tour to the Far East, where he prevented his cousin from being killed by a fanatic who assaulted him at Otsu, Japan (Vol. 1, p. 269).

Whatever may be the ultimate outcome of the present crisis, one result is, by general consensus of opinion, regarded as already assured-namely, the permanent freedom of Crete from Turkish oppression. This will always stand to the credit of the Greek intervention. Nothing less will in any case induce the insurgents to accept terms of peace, or will afford to Greece an excuse for receding from the policy of annexation; nor will anything less satisfy the general public opinion of the civilized world, which has learned to put little trust in the good faith of the ruling class in Turkey in giving effect to promised reforms. This practical obliteration of Turkish rule in Crete can be accomplished, if not by the out-and-out concession of the island to Greece, then only by the establishment of a strong form of autonomous government under guarantee of the powers. Samos and Eastern Roumelia are most frequently mentioned as models. The governor, whoever he be, must have behind him the force of an international sanction; he must be free from the attacks of political intrigues even at Athens; the gendarmerie must be strong enough to mantain order, and so constituted as not to become the instrument of local quarrels; and the tribunals must be fitted to dis