discretion to oppose any hostile designs as regarded the island, it incurred losses which the advantages to be gained would not justify. So the Liberals were anxious, as evidenced by Granville’s despatches to Goschen on Cyprus, to release Britain from the obligation to defend Turkey under the Anglo-Turkish Convention; Gladstone and Goschen even suggested negotiating at once to give up Cyprus to Greece.129 From late 1880, reports of Britain’s intention to surrender Cyprus began to circulate, forcing Victoria to announce, unconstitutionally, in mid-1881 that she would not consent to a cession of Cyprus. After all, the Liberal government had not advised the surrender of Cyprus (all the talk about giving up Cyprus was done in private and not confided to the cabinet),130 but it was implicitly understood that, if the British continued to hold Cyprus on its present tenure, the island would some day in the rupture of the Ottoman Empire join Greece. After all, then, the Liberals’ ideas would still prevail.
V. Conclusion: Ideas and Practices in the Liberals’
Eastern Policy
It has been pointed out that Gladstone’s theory of foreign policy was always a sharp contrast to Disraeli’s, but the difference in practice was by no means material.131 After taking office in 1880, the Liberals adopted in substance the policy of their predecessors in the Eastern Question. Such a result was not surprising to all deep thinkers, and it was in a sense
129 PRO, PRO30/29/123, Gladstone to Granville, 17 Dec. 1880. In consideration of English public opinion, Granville’s reply was exactly in the negative. See BL, Add. MSS. 44172, f.325, Granville to Gladstone, 19 Dec. 1880.
130 The communications on the surrender of Cyprus were exchanged between Gladstone, Granville and Goschen only, and not revealed to the cabinet or even Dilke, the Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office. See BL, Add. MSS. 43924, f.55, Dilke’s diary on 15 June 1881.
131 C. J. Lowe, The Reluctant Imperialists: British Foreign Policy 1878-1902 (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), vol. I, 21.
satisfactory. Preserving the “perfect consistency” between the Liberals’ and Conservatives’ policies in carrying out the Berlin Treaty,132 the questions of the Greek and Montenegrin frontiers, and of Armenian reforms – the necessity for its settlement had been repeatedly urged by Lord Salisbury – were taken up with increased vigour by the Gladstone government. Taunted with “servilely following the policy of the late government,” Granville only replied that, as the 1880 general election had condemned the Conservatives’ policy by an enormous majority, the Liberal ministry was not supposed to feebly follow the example of its predecessor. The efforts of the Liberal government to secure the fulfilment of the Berlin Treaty were, therefore, very remarkable indeed; and although they took much time to consider their stance under the Anglo-Turkish Convention, they strove to avoid any declarations that would further embarrass the British position.
Even though the difference between the two political parties in regard of foreign policy was primarily a matter of degree, the Eastern Question had undergone substantial changes owing to the Liberals’ handling. The relations between Britain and Turkey deteriorated even more rapidly during Gladstone’s second ministry. Since 1880 the tendency grew in London to retreat from the Balkans, until the occupation of Egypt in 1882 drastically twisted Anglo-Turkish relations and greatly aggravated their hostilities.133
At first, the Liberals’ attitude towards the Ottoman Empire was ambivalent. Soon after coming to power, Gladstone warned Musurus Pasha, the Turkish Ambassador to London, that Turkey should not expect British aid in the last resort.134 By this, the Prime Minister tried to repudiate the popular notion that Britain recognized a separate and vital interest in the maintenance of the independence and integrity of the Turkish Empire, but
132 PRO, PRO30/29/37, Granville to Victoria, 8 Nov. 1880.
133 See Azmi Ozcan, Pan-Islamism: Indian Muslims, the Ottomans and Britain, 1877-1924 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 45, 94.
134 PRO, PRO30/29/123, Gladstone’s memorandum, 13 May 1880; also cf. BL, Add. MSS.
44544, f.7, Gladstone to Granville, 12 May 1880. Gladstone’s conversation with Mususrus took place on 14 May. On 20 May the aforesaid stance was expounded to the Houses by Gladstone and Granville respectively. See Hansard, 3rd Series, vol. 252, “Address in Answer to Her Majesty’s Most Gracious Speech,” 20 May 1880, 101, 141.
he did not at once “put an end to imposture in [Britain’s] dealing with Turkey and…let the facts stand out in the light of day.”135 “The Treaty of Berlin was the legal and natural base of our policy,” Gladstone said to Musurus, emphasizing that his government did not want to see any of the Powers exercise separate and special influence in Turkey.136 Though a representative of extreme opinions about Turkey, Gladstone never proposed the abolition of the Sultan’s authority. In September 1876 Gladstone said publicly that he did not intend that the Turks should be driven from the whole Balkans except Bulgaria. (The Times, 9 Sept. 1876) And in May 1880 he said in Parliament: “I proposed, undoubtedly, that Turkish administration should cease in certain provinces, and it has ceased there.”137 On examination, his “bag and baggage” theory was really misleading.138 Instead of it, he later argued that, if an agreeable relationship could be established between the Sultan and his subjects, then his supremacy might come to play a useful part in excluding foreign influence. And the best means of achieving such a relationship was, Gladstone stressed, administrative – not political – autonomy for the provinces. He then declared that, unless Turkey tolerably discharged its duties, its independence and integrity had to be left to shift for themselves.
But this statement did not actually change the essential conditions of the Eastern Question. Preserving the position of the Turkish Empire was for the time being convenient.
It was in the main due to the persistence and determination of the Gladstone Government that the Treaty of Berlin had been carried out. And in so doing, the Prime Minister believed that his government could “always be found on the side of legality and liberty.”139 Indeed, the Liberals prided
135 Gladstone to Sir A. Gordon (Governor of New Zealand), 8 Sept. 1880, quoted in D. W. R.
Bahlman, ed., The Diary of Sir Edward Walter Hamilton 1880-1885, vol. I, 47.
136 BL, Add. MSS. 56445, f.95, Gladstone’s note, 14 May 1880.
137 Hansard, 3rd Series, vol. 252, “Address in Answer to Her Majesty’s Most Gracious Speech,” 20 May 1880, Gladstone, 142.
138 For further argument see Allan Cunningham (edited by Edward Ingram), Eastern Questions in the Nineteenth Century: Collected Essays (London: Frank Cass, 1993), 232.
139 BL, Add. MSS. 44544, f.172, Gladstone to D. K. Zankof (Prime Minister of Bulgaria), 26
themselves on the fact that no stipulations favourable to Turkey in the treaty remained unfulfilled. “Beyond sea, in Europe, Asia and Africa,”
Gladstone said in 1881 with comfortable satisfaction, “the horizon has been greatly cleared and a progress made in the sense of liberty, justice, and humanity.”140 With the same view, the Liberal government did not give more sanction than necessary to the validity of the Anglo-Turkish Convention, although it did not revise or abandon the agreement, either.141 According to Granville’s circular despatch of 4 May 1880, it was the Berlin Treaty rather than the Cyprus Convention upon which the reformed administration in Asiatic Turkey was to be based.142 On this subject the Liberals felt a little awkward, while most of them were strongly disposed to abrogate the convention.143 In their view, the acquisition of Cyprus was of no advantage
May 1881.
140 Gladstone to J. Cowan, 30 May 1881, quoted in H. C. G. Matthew, ed., The Gladstone Diaries, vol. X, 73.
141 In fact, the validity of the Anglo-Turkish Convention was not formally acknowledged by the British Government, since it had never been ratified by the Sultan, except in a mode which Salisbury declined to acknowledge. The majority of the Gladstone cabinet were bitterly opposed to the Anglo-Turkish Convention. And Selborne, the Lord Chancellor, thought that, in a legal sense, Britain was able to terminate the convention. See PRO, PRO30/29/141, Selborne to Granville, 16 May 1880.
142 As Sir Edward W. Hamilton put it: “Considering how little is likely to come out of our separate engagements in Asia Minor by reason of the Anglo-Turkish Convention, we may as well fall back on the general article in the Berlin Treaty affecting our interests in it, retaining of course complete liberty of action in certain eventualities.” Hamilton’s diary on 7 June 1880, in D. W. R. Bahlman, ed., The Diary of Sir Edward Walter Hamilton 1880-1885, vol. I, 19.
143 Gladstone was reported to have stated that the Cyprus Convention was an instrument from which Britain could not withdraw. To correct this report, he emphasized that he had not said anything about withdrawing from the convention, but that he regarded it as a serious abridgement of the freedom of British action in the East. See Hansard, 3rd Series, vol. 252,
“Cyprus (Orders in Council),” 1 June 1880, Gladstone, 922. It was no wonder that the Liberal government was not enthusiastic about colonizing Cyprus as the second Malta. The acquisition of Cyprus was repugnant to the Liberals because, among other things, it seriously weakened Britain’s position for resisting the French intrigues in Tunis. This in turn trapped the British deep in the island. “If it had not been for Tunis,” Kimberley complained to the Foreign Secretary, “we might perhaps have been able to relieve ourselves of one of the many clogs which fetter our administration of [Cyprus].” See PRO, PRO30/29/135,
to Britain whether in a military or political sense; and, what was worse, the mode of acquiring it destroyed the opinion that Britain had no wish for territorial aggrandisement at the sacrifice of Turkey. Consequently, the special powers of the British Consuls in Asia Minor as well as Britain’s claims of single-handed interference on the ground of the Anglo-Turkish Convention were all withdrawn ere long. That the necessity for reforms should be pressed by all the Powers in concert, and not by Britain alone, became a principle in British foreign policy ever since. The brief period of the privileged position of Britain in Turkey was over from this time.144 Yet, although many Radicals intended to abandon the convention by reason that Turkey had failed to carry out its promise of reform; they withheld their intention because to abandon it altogether would seem to invite Russia to advance. Thus, it was Granville, rather than Gladstone, who resisted the pressure for a denunciation of the Anglo-Turkish Convention.
Gladstone’s policy in the East was, at first at least, a sincere offer of help to world peace. All progress in the Montenegrin question, for instance, was delayed until the Liberal government gave in 1880 a fresh impetus to the treaty negotiations and organized united pressure by the Powers at Constantinople.145 Gladstone was particularly stern about Montenegro, always prepared to use onward measures. But, as he was also anxious to prevent reopening the Eastern Question generally, what he had proposed was little more than local action. The Liberals’ position on the Greek question was less determined than in the case of Montenegro, mainly because they thought the stipulations of the Berlin Treaty regarding the Greco-Turkish line not “indisputably just.”146 “There seems to me to be room for introducing at the proper time the question of a liberal price to be paid to Turkey if – as is probable and perhaps desirable – the interpretation
Kimberley to Granville, 20 June 1881.
144 Harold Temperley and L. M. Penson, Foundations of British Foreign Policy from Pitt (1792) to Salisbury (1902), 399, 405.
145 Under the Disraeli government, no forcible measures were applied to the Porte to settle the Eastern Question. For more discussion, see “Six Months of Liberal Government,” The Quarterly Review, vol. 105, no. 300 (Oct. 1880), 607.
146 PRO, PRO30/29/123, Gladstone to Granville, 13 Oct. 1880.
of the Treaty…should be in favour…of Greece,” Gladstone wrote in a memorandum for Granville.147 While admitting of a departure from the policy of the Berlin Congress, Gladstone did not allow justice to be compromised by the strong feeling of philhellenism (or anti-Islamism) existing both in his party and his country. This mattered materially in world politics, where Britain dominated as a superpower; more so after the reversal of the French policy in the Balkans had paralyzed the European Concert and thrown upon English statesmen the burden of carrying out the Berlin Treaty. In keeping with legality and justice, the Gladstone government markedly deprecated the nationalist movement for uniting Bulgaria with Eastern Roumelia, which overrode the Berlin settlement.
Assuredly, it did not require any special initiative on the part of the Gladstone government to call the attention of the Powers to the Eastern Question: it forced itself upon the attention of Europe in an urgent manner.148 Indeed, the Liberal government did not claim special credit in fulfilling the Berlin Treaty, being content to leave the initiative to Austria in the Montenegrin question, and to France in the Greek question. Still, much was due to the action of Britain, who was in a position to do more than any other Power to promote the European Concert towards Turkey.
Although some of the provisions of the Berlin Treaty remained unrealized, the Liberal government was very successful as the champion of the public (international) law since these were chiefly matters of internal administration, with respect to which it was difficult to enforce a specific demand. (The only important question still unsettled under the Berlin Treaty was that of the freedom of navigation on the Danube.) In spite of many unsolved problems, Gladstone contented himself with the result of his government’s efforts that the “most legitimate aspirations and claims [had] been effectually satisfied.”149
147 PRO, PRO30/29/123, memorandum by Gladstone for Granville, 18 June 1880.
148 The Times, 12 May 1880, 11b.
149 Gladstone’s speech in Edinburgh on 1 Sept. 1884, in W. E. Gladstone, Third Midlothian Campaign: Political Speeches (Edinburgh: Andrew Elliot, undated), 40. At the end of 1881 Gladstone told a close friend: “Almost the whole of the work, which confronted us in April 1880 as of immediate urgency, has been accomplished. I, who only came back to office with
It was almost impossible for the Liberal Party to come into power and follow strictly, or throw over, all the principles in foreign affairs that they had advocated in opposition. To quote his words again, “Diplomacy is essentially irresponsible and I hold it to be the worst possible training for responsible, and a fortiori for despotic government,” Gladstone said in 1878.150 Nearly in a way of making confessions, he put in a memorandum two years later:
Those of us who sit in the House of Commons were certainly not returned to Parliament to carry forward the foreign policy of the last government. And this was known throughout the country, and beyond it. Nevertheless, sensible of the expediency of maintaining as far as might be a continuity in foreign policy, we sought for a ground of action which might be common to both political parties. We found this ground in the unfulfilled clauses of the Treaty of Berlin which for all reasons it was urgent to press forward.151
In Montenegro and Greece Gladstone’s policy was in clear contrast to Salisbury’s for the special countenance Gladstone gave to nationalist aspirations, but his Bulgarian policy was not different from his predecessor’s because of treaty requirements. The need to act through the agency of Europe (i. e., the Concert of Europe) necessarily held in check Gladstone’s liberal schemes, but he was well disposed to keep to it because it was the most effectual means of checking selfish ambitions. He happily testified to the Kantian view of morality by saying: “[It is] almost a moral impossibility that all the united Powers of Europe ever can consciously act together for the pursuit of an object that is unjust.”152 It was certainly not easy or even possible to settle in the interest of civilization the Eastern
what I thought a special mission, ought on this showing to be packing up my portmanteaus and preparing for a final retirement.” See BL, Add. MSS. 43515, f.5, Gladstone to Ripon, 24 Nov. 1881.
150 See footnote no. 10.
151 BL, Add. MSS. 44764, f.101, Gladstone’s memorandum, 23 Sept. 1880.
152 Quoted in The Times, 30 Sept. 1880, 9b. The principal moral law Kant put forward was:
“Act as if the maxim from which you act were to become through your will a universal law.”
Question, which the Berlin Treaty had peacefully shelved, but not solved.
Yet, the European Concert Gladstone’s second premiership had established compelled the Powers to behave well and constituted a satisfactory guarantee against surprises in the East. In this sense and not for philanthropic reasons, the Liberals’ policy overseas was really a triumph for humanity.
（責任編輯：楊宗霖 校對：周如怡）