kryzys bułgarski

180

CHAPTER 9

told the Emperor AIexander as much, and he took both of my hands and expressed his fuli agreement! (Russia has experienced this in 1853/6 andAustria in 1859 and 1866).

—CP, 1:181

9.3

THE BULGARIAN HORRORS

Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, 6 September 1876 • Disraeli to Derby, 8 September 1876

In July 1875, Herzegovina rosę against its Ottoman administrators. By May 1876, the insur-

rection spread to the Bulgarian-speaking districts of the Ottoman Empire, only to be crushed,

with appalling barbarity, by Ottoman irregulars. The news of the Bulgarian atrocities left the

British cabinet of Benjamin Disraeli quite unmoved but stirred generał outrage among the lit-

erate public. Predictably, the chief beneficiary of this ground swell was William Ewart Glad-stone, elder statesman of the Liberał opposition. In making himself a leading spokesman for this cause, Gladstone was animated by humanitarian considerations, but he also found in the Bulgarian issue the means to attack the Disraeli government. The pfece de rśsistance in Glad-stone's campaign against both Ottoman misrule and the Disraeli cabinet was his publication, in September 1876, of a pamphlet entitled Bulgarian Horrors and the Question ofthe East. But Gladstone wavered on what was perhaps the crucial point—his prescription for the futurę of Ottoman rule in Europę. Nonetheless, sales of the pamphlet—200,000 copies in the first month—outpaced all other publications on the subject and dwarfed by far even Gladstone's own follow-up effort of March 1877, Lessons in Massacre.

In the course of the summer, the situation in the Balkans had become, if anything, morę complicated. Serbia, a self-governing province ofthe Ottoman Empire, in June 1876 declared war against its nominał overlord, the sułtan. Russian volunteers—most prominent among them General Cherniaev, the conqueror of Tashkent (Document 6.6)—flocked to Serbia but could not ward off a series of deyastąŁjng defeats inflicted by the Ottoman armies. But the ca-tastrophes that befell Serbia madę it airficult for the Russian government to resist the increas-ing domestic outpouring of support for Serbia. In his pamphlet, Gladstone chose to ignore this factor. In any case, this development was likely to undermine his prediction that Russia would play "for the present epoch what is called the waiting gamę."

Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, 6 September 1876

... there have been perpetrated, undet the immediate authority of a Government to which all the time we have been giving the strongest morał, and for part of the time even materiał support, crimes and outrages, so vast in scalę as to exceed all modern example, and so unutterably vile as well as fierce in character, that it passes the power of heart to conceive, and of tongue and pen adeąuately to describe them. These are the Bulgarian horrors; and the ąuestion is, What can and should be done, either to punish, or to brand, or to prevent?. |.

Let me endeavour very briefly to sketch, in the rudest outline, what the Turkish race was and what it is. It is not a ąuestion of Mahometanism simply, but of Ma*

pooietanism compounded with the peculiar character of a race. They are not the Inld Mahometans of India, nor the chivalrous Saladins of Syria, nor the cultured Moors of Spain. They were, upon the whole, from the black day when they first en-Jfcred Europę, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity. Wherever they went, i broad linę of blood marked the track behind them; and, as far as their dominion ched, civilisation disappeared from view....

Now, as regards the territorial integrity of Turkey, I for one am still desirous to see tupheld, though I do not say that desire should be treated as of a thing paramount to jaill higher objects of policy. For all the objects of policy, in my conviction, humanity, 'onally understood, and in due relation to justice, is the first and highest....

Let theTurks now carry away their abuses in the onły possible manner, namely by ■arrying off themselves. Their Zaptichs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and their Kizbachis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I F°P^e> elear out from the province they have desolated and profaned. This thorough pddance, this most blessed deliverance, is the only reparation we can make to the piemory of those heaps on heaps of dead; to the violated purity alike of matron, of ptaiden, and of child; to the civilisation which has been affronted and shamed; to the $hws of God or, if you like, of Allah; to the morał sense of mankind at large....

—William Ewart Gladstone, Bulgarian Horrors and the Question ofthe East (London, 1876), 11-13;

51-53; 61-62

*)

Disraeli to Derby, 8 September 1876

f,.. Gladstone has had the impudence to send me his pamphlet, tho’ he accuses me of fceveral crimes. The document is passionate and not strong; vindictive and ill-■witten—that of course. Indeed in that respect, of all the Bulgarian horrors, perhaps the greatest....

—Monypenny and Buckie, Life of... Disraeli, 6:60

n.4 THE OTTOMAN CONSTITUTION, 11/23 DECEMBER 1876

BUticle 9 of the Peace of Paris denied the powers "the right to interfere, either collectively or ■eparately, in the relations of His Majesty the Sułtan with his subjects, ... [or] in the Internat ŁAdministrafion of his Empire" (Document 5.7). Notwithstanding this article, the powers re-kponded to the slaughter in the Balkans with a spate of notes and suggestions. By November 1)876, they had tired of the evasions and subterfuges of the Porte and finally ordered their am-passadors in Constantinople to meet in conference for the purpose of devising a reform proj-Wt for the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire. But as the conference wound down, ■te Porte upstaged the powers by promulgating a constitution. Its reasoning was that the civi| and political liberties envisaged in this constitution surpassed the measures contemplated by ■te Constantinople conference. Hence, so went the argument, such measures had become feinnecessary. An even morę unmistakable hint of the Porte's resolve to fight off the interven-non ofthe Great Powers (and particularly the plans of the Constantinople conference to carve an autonomous Bulgarian region out of Turkey-in-Europe) came at the very outset of the