Part 21

The condition of affairs in Eastern Roumelia is much less hopeful, as the difficulties encountered in the organization of the Government are very much greater and more numerous. North of the Balkans they are only such as might be experienced by any new Representative Government in any civilized country, but in the nondescript province of Roumelia the people are suffering from evils inflicted upon them by the Congress of Berlin. Everything is unsettled. No one knows who rules the country, or what is the form of government. It seems to be for the interest of certain parties to prolong this state of things and introduce as much disorder as possible. The people are kept in a constant state of excitement, and no one knows what to expect from one day to another. The Congress of Berlin is primarily responsible for this, and no doubt it was for the interest of Austria to keep up a state of anarchy and confusion in European Turkey. It was her plan to absorb the European provinces herself, and the way must be kept open to Salonica and if possible to Constantinople. It is believed here that England went to Berlin with a secret agreement to support these pretensions of Austria, but no one sees exactly how England is to profit by this arrangement. It is certain that no one in Turkey gained anything by the division of Bulgaria, but the evils which have resulted would have been much less if in addition to this division the Congress had not devised the extraordinary scheme of giving different forms of Government to the two Bulgarias. This plan, of course, insured the permanent discontent of the whole Bulgarian nation, but, worse than this, it made the impression upon the Turks and Greeks that the arrangement for Eastern Roumelia was only a temporary one, and that by skilful agitation they might overturn it. They have not failed to improve this opportunity. The Phanariote and Roumelian Greeks are doing everything in their power to create disturbance and cause difficulty in Eastern Roumelia. An unceasing torrent of abuse is poured out upon the Bulgarians by the Greek papers and their French organ the _Phare du Bosphore_. They are full of false statements and misrepresentations of every kind, and a portion of the Greeks in the province act in full sympathy with these papers. Free Greece does not sympathize with this crusade, and an attempt was made a few weeks since to induce the Greeks here to come to an understanding with the Bulgarian Church, by withdrawing the excommunication and arranging for harmonious co-operation. It is understood that the Patriarch was in favour of this, but the Greek papers here opposed it with a violence which was incomprehensible to the uninitiated. They declared that "the maintenance of the schism was the only hope of Hellenism," and appealed to the Porte to prevent by force a reconciliation "which would inevitably result in the union of Greeks and Bulgarians to drive out the Turks and divide the country between them," This opposition on the part of the Phanariotes prevented the execution of the plan.

The Turks also are doing what they can to create disturbance in the province, and find some excuse for occupying it with their army. This was, of course, to be expected, and is in some degree excusable. They naturally wish to regain possession of this rich province, and they feel that they have cause of complaint against the Bulgarians, who do not receive the returning refugees with much cordiality. There are real difficulties on both sides which cannot fail to give rise to serious trouble. It is a pity that the whole arrangement could not have been left to a really impartial Commission, free to act on principles of equity and common sense. The difficulties are such as these, for example. There are many towns where the Bulgarian quarter was burned by the Turks. When the Turks fled and the Bulgarians returned, they occupied the Turkish houses, and they are now naturally disinclined to give them up to the refugees and camp in the fields. Again, there are many cases where the Bulgarians were deprived of their lands in the most iniquitous manner some years ago, under the pretence of a new law in regard to title-deeds. These lands were seized by rich Turks, who fled during the war, but now come back to claim them. The Bulgarians have the original titles and the Turks new ones. To whom do the lands rightly belong?

There are other cases where Turks return who are known to have taken part in the massacres. There has been a general amnesty, but it can hardly be expected that these persons will be well received. These are only a few of the many difficulties connected with the return of the refugees which irritate the Turks and the Bulgarians both; and in some cases both parties merit our sympathy.

In addition to these deliberate attempts to make trouble on the part of the Turks, Greeks, and also of some few hot-headed Bulgarians who are foolish enough to suppose that a disturbance might hasten their union with the Principality, the confusion in the Government is a source of constant trouble. No one knows what the Government is. The Porte claims supreme authority, and sends peremptory orders to the Pacha. The Pacha naturally considers himself the head of the Government. The European Commission claims the right to exercise control whenever it sees fit. The Consuls assume the right to intrigue or to dictate in the name of their respective Governments. The Administrative Council, a majority of which is Bulgarian, considers itself to be responsible for the administration, and there is a Constitution of hundreds of articles which is theoretically the law of the land. A National Assembly is soon to be added to the list. The militia have been under the command of a Levantine Frenchman, who was not responsible to the Governor, and who does not appear to have had a single qualification for his office. Happily he has just been replaced by a better man.

Having inflicted all this confusion upon Eastern Roumelia, the European Powers are complaining that the people do not know how to govern themselves! Perhaps they do not, but as yet they have had no opportunity to make the experiment. If peace and quiet is ever to be restored to this unhappy province, the Government must be simplified and consolidated; it must be left to manage its own affairs, and to make the best it can of the elaborate Constitution which Europe has conferred upon it. Alecko Pacha is not a great man, but he was the best man available for his position, and he is a man who is much more likely to throw up his office in disgust at the trouble which it gives him than to lend himself to any scheme for resisting the will of Europe. He ought to be encouraged and supported. The Bulgarians, who constitute the majority of the population, are discontented at the arbitrary action which separated them from the Principality, but they are satisfied that they have nothing to gain from any present agitation of this question, and they only desire to be left to govern themselves in accordance with the decision of Europe, and to be assured that they will not be turned over again to the tender mercies of the Turkish Government. The fear of this is universal, and it is this fear which keeps them in a state of constant excitement. It is not without reason. A large Turkish army is camped on their borders. The Porte is seeking some excuse for entering the province. Certain European representatives at Philippopolis are always threatening this, and the people believe that they are intriguing to bring it about. Everything is in confusion and uncertainty in regard to the Government, and nothing seems settled. There can be no peace and quiet in a country which is in constant fear of invasion, and something ought to be done to remove this fear from Eastern Roumelia. The Turkish army should certainly be removed, and the Porte should be warned to let Alecko Pacha alone and allow him to organize his Government as best he can. If this source of fear and irritation were removed, the Bulgarians would accept the situation and make the best of it. It would be for their interest to do so, and an industrious, thrifty population is always quick to see what is for its interest.

The gymnastic clubs, which were originally formed for another purpose, are now kept up and supported by sober, conservative men, simply from this fear of a Turkish invasion. If the fear were removed these associations would be dissolved at once, as they ought to be; for Bulgarian merchants are not in the habit of spending money for anything which is not essential to their well-being. These clubs are not revolutionary, but they might become a source of disorder if they were made permanent.

It is not probable that the European Powers will allow any invasion of the country; but the Turks have always in hand the pretence of sending troops to occupy the Balkans, and this fact to some extent justifies the fears of the Bulgarians. If there were danger of another Russian invasion, the Turks would be fully justified in occupying the passes at once, and there is nothing in Eastern Roumelia to prevent or even delay such an occupation; but under present circumstances, when there is nothing to be feared from Russia--when peace and quiet is the thing of all others to be desired--the occupation of the Balkans would be a crime.

AN EASTERN STATESMAN.

CONTEMPORARY BOOKS.

I.--HISTORY AND LITERATURE OF THE EAST.

(_Under the Direction of_ Professor E. H. PALMER.)

Colonel Malleson certainly did well to claim permission to rewrite Sir John Kaye's last volume (_History of the Indian Mutiny_, by Colonel Malleson, Vol. I., London: W. H. Allen & Co.), and comparison of the two may afford to the historian of the future valuable aid in interpreting the volumes yet to come. A great part of the present must be held to be the work of the virulent pamphleteer and violent partisan rather than of the historian; and if the quotations of, and references to, the Red Pamphlet indicate relations between Colonel Malleson and its author, the publishers cannot be held to have exercised a wise discretion in their choice.

The task of the reviewer of such a book is unusually heavy. Book for book, almost chapter for chapter, it is intended to replace Sir John Kaye's work, and the reviewer therefore needs to study the two carefully, and to compare them minutely. Colonel Malleson, no doubt, had access to Sir John Kaye's materials, but within a certain field seems to have been unable to see the other side of any question. To arm, to leave Sepoys armed, is simply to detain European troops to watch them; it is nothing that to disarm them is to drive them, and all their connections, wild with terror as sheep marked for the slaughter; yet he cannot be ignorant of the cases in which a few bad men committed a regiment, and how whole regiments "went" in terror of their masters' vengeful distrust.[105] In saying, as he does so confidently, that by enrolling the Calcutta Volunteers on their first offer, on 20th May, Lord Canning would have set free half a European regiment, Colonel Malleson must have been thinking of what the Volunteers might have been fit to do had they been enrolled and drilled six months before,--provided they had been willing to take the day-work of garrison duty, and to think more of the State than of the house and furniture at Ballygunj: the real profit of the enrolment was the confidence and cheerfulness organization gave to the Europeans themselves. And--to take a more important instance--the "Gagging Act" was an insolent expression of distrust of Englishmen, an attempt to prevent their opinions reaching England _in print_. For distrust of their discretion English editors had given cause enough, and for influencing English opinion, as Indian newspapers may be said to be unknown in England in their original sheets, a letter from the editor of the _Friend of India_ to any English paper would have been as sure of English readers, and of as much weight with them, as if it had been set up in the damp printing-house at Serampore.

Colonel Malleson quotes from the "Red Pamphlet," as Sir John Kaye had done before him, a smart description of "Panic Sunday." From Colonel Cavanagh's report it seems pretty clear that the higher classes--the "society"--of Calcutta were not among the refugees in the fort, and as Secretaries to Government and Members of Council may be counted on the fingers, it would be as well if the historian would name the fugitives before death takes all who could answer the charge. We have had access to the diary of a young civilian, then a guest of the Member of Council who lived furthest from Government House, away in Alipore, beyond the house of the Lieutenant-Governor and the great jail of Alipore and the lines of the native regiment which was the great terror of Calcutta: on that Sunday, host and guest went to the Cathedral twice as usual, and after the evening service the guest returned home, while the host drove to Calcutta to call on some cousins; as the cousins had driven to Alipore, and the visitors at both houses waited a while those households at least were afoot till a later hour than usual, and at last went to bed as usual without closing an extra door.

The second chapter closes with an impassioned peroration, wherein the removal of Mr. William Tayler from his post at Patna is likened to the judicial murder of Lally, and the starvation of Dupleix. It is clear enough, from Colonel Malleson's account, that Mr. Tayler liked to carry out his own plans too well to risk interference by over-frankness to his superiors. In the face of an enemy such concealment may be as mischievous as disobedience, and Sir John Kaye reminds us that at an earlier date confidence in Mr. Tayler's judgment had been shaken; and his report of his message to his district officers, the report which immediately preceded, and probably led to, his suspension, says nothing of the clause which sets the treasure above anything save human life. Under any circumstances Mr. Tayler's defence is not helped by sharp censures on Mr. Money, or by blindness to the fact that the best intelligence made a march to Patna seem more perilous than the far longer one through a jungle country to Calcutta. Wise after the event, indeed, we may see that Mr. Tayler's forecast was sounder than Mr. Halliday's; but the Lieutenant-Governor, and Lord Canning too, could only act on the circumstances known to them, and Mr. Tayler was replaced by an officer of yet higher rank in the official hierarchy, and probably forestalled renewed promotion by resigning the Service as soon as he could get a pension. But why were not his services rewarded? asks Colonel Malleson, ready with the hard word "intrigue." But who were the sharers in the intrigue, and who was to profit by it? Men whom Lord Canning sharply rebuked and degraded were yet recommended by him for honour, and no courteous letter from Mr. Talbot can do away with the fact that the Viceroy, writing when all heat of strife was over and all facts known, yet did not obtain for Mr. Tayler any distinction.

On one point, however, we are bound to protest against Sir John Kaye's harsh judgment: to him the arrest of the Wahabi leaders was a scandalous breach of the usages of war. But they were unquestionably subjects of the British Crown, and the question surely is--would they have resisted arrest by ordinary process or not? If not, they had to thank Mr. Tayler for courteous consideration in arresting them himself, and detaining them in honourable captivity; in resisting they would have been guilty of that rebellion against their sovereign in which there was too good reason to believe them sharers.

On the many points whereon both authors are in substantial accord it would be waste of space to touch, and we pass to the other important episode in which Colonel Malleson traverses Sir John Kaye's judgment, and here our verdict is with the later author: in treating of Durand's conduct at Indore, Colonel Malleson seems to have risen above the region of personal feeling, if not of personal knowledge; so that while his full and vivid narrative shows plainly the difficulties, political and strategical, of Durand's position and also of his retreat, he shows as clearly that it is no simple case of Durand _versus_ Holkar, but one in which each may be commended without loss of credit to the other.

So much space has been of necessity devoted to the chief points on which the two authors are at variance, that none is left for the transactions which Colonel Malleson's changed arrangement brings into the present volume, though Kaye had intended for them a place in some later one. His work in the new field makes us only the more regret that he did not bring to his task the unbiassed mind of a man who had never known the author of the Red Pamphlet or Mr. William Tayler. But we would, in a concluding word, beg him to revise his Indian spelling; to a man who has once felt the charm of a fancy rule the claims of established usage go for nothing, but at all events he may be decently consistent; why does Colonel Malleson double so many letters which in Urdu are single, and why does he spell the name of the ancient and famous, if now obscure, town of Jaunpore as though it were "the City of Life"?

Captain Low's _History of the Indian Navy_ (2 vols., London: Bentley & Son) has long been reproachfully demanding notice; it is easy to say something about such a work, not easy to treat it worthily. A man could hardly put together 1100 pages of small type without recording many noteworthy facts, but all matters of interest might have been packed in much smaller compass, and so packed would have found more readers and a more favourable verdict.

The two volumes trace the rise and fall of the Navy from its germ in the "ten grabs and galivats" taken up for the defence of the factory and shipping of Surat in 1615, through the period of its glory when its ships bore the Company's flag alongside of the Royal Navy on many hard-fought days, through its decline, when they carried mails or transported troops with rare enjoyment of a brush, to its abolition in our own time, when, less fortunate than its sister service, it fell a victim to mutiny and disorders in which it had no share.

The first period in its history ends with the year 1759, when, with the capture of Gheriah, and the destruction of Angria's power, piracy as a business of State came to an end, and when the ruin of the Seedee, and the substitution of the Company as High Admiral of the Mogul Empire, placed the local Marine first among the maritime powers of India. Its first serious service was in the operations which broke the power of the Portuguese in the Gulf, and in 1622 reduced Ormuz from an emporium of proverbial wealth and magnificence to its normal condition of a poor barren island, and for many years the Portuguese found it as much occupation as the pirates who might well have been its first concern. No doubt the captains of well-armed India-men, whose crews were borrowed for service on grabs and galivats, looked down on the latter as a sort of coastguard, but the aid of such light craft was invaluable against the shoals of small vessels which beset new-comers fore and aft, pouring down crowds of well-armed men from their long overhanging prows. For in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the shores of the Indian Ocean swarmed with pirates, kept down indeed by the Portuguese in the heyday of their power, but making head again till, by the middle of the seventeenth century, according to Italian travellers, they feared none but Dutch and English, and these only for a pestilent practice of firing the magazine rather than surrender. Yet to the Mogul governor of Surat probably the pirate of home growth was less objectionable than the intrusive trader; and indeed the Nuwab was not without excuse if he regarded the European as a more powerful pirate, seeing that some commanders took by force goods which the native owner would not sell, others ransacked ships not said to belong to the Mogul's ports, the mutinous crews of others became open pirates; and lastly, we find Captain Kidd, and other heroes of the black flag, practising their vocation in these seas. The native pirate, the European rival, and the professional rover, kept the local marine pretty well employed, but it is not always easy to distinguish between the services of this body and the Company's armed trading ships.

Of more interest to the Mogul Government than foreign trade were the vessels in which Mahomedan pilgrims of all ranks sailed to Arabian and Persian shrines, and for their benefit it came to terms with the Seedee, better known to us as the Hubshi of Jinjirah, the boldest of the pirates, giving him a large allowance and high rank to secure his convoy. The Company made more than one attempt to supplant him, and indeed furnished ships to guard the Mocha-Jeddah fleet in 1698, but the Seedee kept his office till 1759; in the general decay of the central power he first neglected, then openly defied, the Governor of Surat, and instead of protecting trade became its chief oppressor; till at last, in 1759, after much negotiation, the Nuwab induced the Bombay Government to intervene, and as a reward obtained for the Company the Seedee's office. What direct profit the Company derived from the appointment Captain Low does not tell us; the omission can hardly be the consequence of the lamented destruction of papers which followed the sale of the old India House, for he records that in 1694 the Seedee's subsidy amounted to four lacs, no doubt considerably bettered by presents, and in 1735 the money allowance was but a lac and a half: the revenues of the districts and customs assigned to the Company went to support the Surat squadron, but the fees of office granted to the officer who was its deputy amounted, to near a lac of rupees a year; it is well to remember that the holder's gross pay was but Rs.1,000 a year, that the Governor of Bombay had but some £500, and that till near the end of the century private trade was allowed: no one, however, was permitted to enjoy this great prize for a second year. Whatever were the profits to the Company, the Nuwab could see that it did more for its wages than the Seedee, for in the next nine years the Surat squadron destroyed near a hundred pirate vessels of the Gulfs of Cutch and Cambay.