ruin of the national strength, from the effects of a theory acted upon
by the Legislature under the influence of a class majority in
Parliament, would a truly catholic and national policy, protective alike
to all interests, have afforded! An adequate but not redundant currency,
cautiously administered, and relieved from the fatal liability to
abstraction from a great increase of imports in any particular year,
would at once have afforded free scope to national industry, and avoided
the frightful vicissitudes in the demand for labour, which the opposite
system of making the currency entirely dependent on the most evanescent
of earthly things—gold—of necessity occasioned. The terrible monetary
crises of 1825, 1839, and 1847, would have been unfelt. They would have
been surmounted, as that of 1810 had been, by an extended issue of paper
when the gold was for a time abstracted, without their existence being
known to the nation. Industry, protected in every department by adequate
but not oppressive fiscal duties, would have generally and steadily
flourished. Periods of extravagant speculation and exorbitant wages,
followed by commercial depression and general suffering, would have been
unknown. The national revenues, sustained by an adequate currency and
unbroken industry, would have afforded an ample surplus to Government,
both for the public service and the promotion of objects of general
utility, after providing for the maintenance of the sinking-fund.
Emigration, supported, so far as the destitute are concerned, by the
Government resources, and conducted in Government vessels, would have
poured a ceaseless and prolific stream into the Colonies, at once
vivifying their industry, and converting the paupers of England and
Ireland into consumers of our manufactures, at the rate of six or seven
pounds a-head per annum. Pauperism at home, relieved in the classes
where it originates by this wise and paternal policy, would have been
arrested. Crime itself would have been made to minister to the general
good: the jails of Great Britain would have been converted into
industrial academies for behoof of the Colonies. The industry of the
Colonies, encouraged by the protective policy of the mother country, and
supported by the ceaseless streams of its emigration, would have
advanced with rapid strides, and afforded a rising and inexhaustible
mart for domestic manufactures. The ocean would have become a British
lake: the navy of England, the floating bridge which at once united and
protected its distant dependencies.
Colonial discontent would have been unknown. The West Indies, Canada,
and Australia, would have been the most loyal and contented, because the
most flourishing and justly governed parts of the Empire. The foreign
trade of the world would have been to the British Empire what Adam Smith
justly called the most profitable of all trades, a home trade. We should
have raised the raw material for all our staple branches of industry
within ourselves; wool from Australia, cotton from the East and West
Indies, grain from the British isles and Canada. Agriculture at home and
abroad would have advanced abreast of manufactures; commerce and
shipping would have risen with the increase of their productions; the
Navy, fed by an ample and protected commercial marine, and sustained at
an adequate amount by a well-filled treasury, would have secured our
independence, and enabled us to attend to the interests and anticipate
the wants of our remotest dependencies. We should have been alike
independent of foreign nations for the materials of pacific industry,
and superior to them in warlike resources. Great Britain, though grey in
years of renown, would have retained for centuries the vigour of youth,
because she would have been continually renovated by the energy of her
descendants. The paternal hall would have been constantly cheerful and
happy, because it would have been always filled with children and
grandchildren, or enlivened by their exploits. Amidst general prosperity
and unceasing progress, the National Debt—constantly encroached on by a
sustained sinking-fund—would have disappeared. Before this time it would
have been all extinguished; and the taxation of the Empire, reduced to
£30,000,000 or £35,000,000 a-year, would have enabled us for ever to
maintain the national armaments on such a scale as would have qualified
us to bid defiance alike to the covert encroachments of our rivals, or
the open hostility of our enemies. Under the opposite or cheapening
system, the public debt has, on the admission of its ablest supporters,
been virtually doubled; the sinking-fund has, amidst general and almost
constant distress, disappeared; Colonial discontent threatens the Empire
with dismemberment; agricultural distress will speedily render it
dependent for its daily bread on its enemies; and the maintenance of the
national independence, if the present system is persisted in, has been
rendered, for any length of time, impossible.
GREECE AGAIN.
“If, Cassandra-like, amidst the din
Of conflict none will hear, or, hearing, heed
This voice from out the wilderness, the sin
Be theirs, and my own feelings be my meed.”
_Prophecy of Dante._
Greece is a most unfortunate country. She has only escaped the Turks to
be plundered by her rulers and ruined by her protectors. Seventeen years
ago, Lord Palmerston placed King Otho on his throne; he has since been
occupied in making that throne an uneasy seat. King Otho refuses to
answer Lord Palmerston’s letters; in revenge, Great Britain ruins a
number of Greek shipowners, and leaves the Greek ministers unpunished.
The Duke of Wellington has said that he never bombarded a town, and
never saw the necessity for committing such an act of cruelty; and the
saying does him even more honour than his long career of victory. We had
hoped that no Englishman would ever have forgotten this saying; yet Lord
Palmerston bombards the merchants of Greece for the faults of King
Otho’s ministers. We are irresistibly reminded, by this last display of
our Foreign Secretary’s warlike propensities, of Mr Winkle’s fight with
the small boy.
Though much has been written on the subject of this quarrel, both at
home and on the Continent, no clear statement of the exact relations
between England and Greece has been published; nor can it be gathered
even from the papers recently laid before Parliament.[1] We believe,
therefore, that our readers will thank us for devoting a few pages to a
serious examination of the political relations between the two
countries, which will tend to place the recent coercive measures in
their true light. This is the more necessary, because Ministers, both in
debates and Parliamentary papers, have it in their power to conceal
everything relating to the past; and the Opposition must hunt long
before they can spring a single truth in the thickets of official
deception. A view of the subject, under the guidance of truth and common
sense, free both from party views and national prejudices, has been
rendered necessary by the speech of Mr Piscatory, the late French
Minister in Greece. The spoken pamphlet of Mr Piscatory was prepared
with considerable skill; but it communicates hardly a single fact that
has not been perverted by being removed from its true context, or by
having only half its concomitant circumstances narrated. Indeed, Mr
Piscatory having been bellows-blower in the disputes between Sir E.
Lyons, the English envoy at Athens, and King Otho’s ministers, for four
years, is not a famous witness; he has his own secrets to conceal. His
oratorical display did not impose on the good sense of General
Cavaignac, who parodied Sylla’s speech to a wordy Athenian ambassador,
by hinting to the French ex-minister plenipotentiary, “that it seemed
France had sent him to Athens to study rhetoric, not to collect
information.”
The papers laid before Parliament prove the worthlessness of Mr
Piscatory’s diplomacy; but the conduct of Lord Palmerston cannot be
correctly appreciated, unless we trace the connexion of England and
Greece since the convention of 1832, appointing Prince Otho of Bavaria
King of Greece, under the protection and guarantee of England, France,
and Russia. That treaty, it must be recollected, was the work of Lord
Palmerston. King Otho was selected by Lord Palmerston; he was conveyed
to Greece by Lord Palmerston’s favourite diplomatist, Sir E. Lyons; and
it was under Lord Palmerston’s special protection that the
Anglo-Bavarian Regency was furnished with £2,400,000, and allowed to
destroy the institutions of the Greek nation. These facts embrace the
history of British connexion with Greece from 1832 to 1837. Great
Britain, or, to speak more correctly, our Foreign Secretary, is morally
responsible for the government of the Greek kingdom by Count Armansperg,
who ruled far more absolutely than King Otho has ever done, for the
simple reason that he had a better filled purse. Sir E. Lyons supported
him with vigour alike against Russian and French opposition, Greek
patriotism, and constitutional principles, as may be seen by a reference
to the papers laid before Parliament in July 1836.
In 1837, Armansperg was dismissed from office; but Greece is still
suffering from the loss of the institutions he destroyed, and the
political corruption he introduced. Coletti, it is true, imitated his
political system in the internal government with singular aptitude, but
with diminished funds and resources for corruption. Where Armansperg
could appoint an amnestied brigand a captain of infantry, Coletti could
only make some old friend a policeman, or peradventure a consul.
In 1837 the Government of Greece broke off its intimate connexion with
England, and the English Minister at Athens became involved in a
succession of quarrels with the court. It is not necessary for us to
prove that the Bavarian Administration from 1837 to 1843 was bad. All
parties agree that it was intolerable; and the Greeks were universally
applauded when they expelled the whole tribe of Bavarian officials. King
Otho had fallen into an error that might have been expected from a
Whig-created king; he had neglected all the real duties of royalty, and
transacted the business of his under-secretaries of state.
The circumstances that have determined the position of our relations
with Greece, since the Constitution of 1844, occurred in the preceding
period. Lord Palmerston’s first quarrel with the Greek court dates from
1837, and originated in the dissatisfaction then felt, because the
British Minister at Athens did not possess as much influence with King
Otho’s Government as he had possessed with Count Armansperg’s. The
avowed object of British diplomacy, at that period, was to force the
adherents of the English party into office; and King Otho incurred the
enmity of England for preferring the counsels of France and Russia. The
first pitched battle between Greece and England was fought about the
waistcoat of the British Minister’s groom. The question was, whether the
waistcoat worn by Sir E. Lyons’ groom in his stable dress, and in which
he had been carried off to prison for squirting water on a policeman,
was or was not a livery waistcoat. After several weeks’ deliberation,
the Greek court decided, that, although they did not consider the
waistcoat in question to be a livery waistcoat, yet, in consideration of
the fact that the British Minister called it his livery, the Government
of Greece was ready to make every concession that could be required to
heal the wounded honour of Great Britain. Parliament had a narrow escape
of seeing the waistcoat laid before both Houses. Now this is very silly.
Yet there is no doubt that the arrest of the groom was an intentional
insult.
This affair was enacted to lower the English minister in the eyes of the
populace, and compel the English Government to change him. Everybody in
Greece knew that the groom was sent to prison; few Greeks believed that
the Government had apologised for the insult; indeed, nothing but the
sight of a policeman chained before the British legation for twenty-four
hours could have reintegrated the name of England at Athens, so stoutly
did all Government officials declare that no apology was ever made.
Another scene was exhibited for the satisfaction of the court and the
_corps diplomatique_. At a private theatrical representation in King
Otho’s palace, the British minister was left without a chair in the
circle, and remained standing during a long comedy. Some ambassadors
would have been sorely distressed by this species of physical torture;
but the ambassador in question is said to have consoled himself, during
this public exhibition of the feelings of protected Greece to protecting
England, by the reflection that his turn came next.
A blow was shortly after inflicted on the royalty of Greece, from which
it can never recover; but Lord Palmerston is accused of tolerating the
use of forbidden weapons by some of his adherents, in his eagerness to
make the Greek monarch sensible of the impolicy of the conduct of the
Hellenic court. Attacks on the person of King Otho, more bold and
unsparing than the most malignant vituperation of Junius, appeared in a
London morning paper, then supposed to be allowed to imbibe some of its
inspiration from Downing Street. These communications pretended to come
from an anonymous correspondent in Athens, but it was evident the
unknown writer was aware of many things that could hardly be known
beyond the Bavarian court and the sanctuaries of Downing Street. At
least, King Otho drew this conclusion, and apparently on good grounds.
This correspondent informed the world, that his Hellenic Majesty, who
had been selected by Lord Palmerston, and supported with a loan of
£2,400,000, was nevertheless unfit to govern his kingdom; and that a
certificate to this effect had been signed by several officers, civil,
military, and medical, who were then at Athens in the service of King
Otho, and that this certificate had been placed in the hands of King
Louis of Bavaria. This strange communication would have passed unnoticed
in Greece, had it not been made the subject of conversation by all the
English officials, and the attention of Greek statesmen called to it by
the British legation and consulates. At last, it was publicly noticed by
the Greek press, and an outcry produced. Three of the Bavarians named as
having signed the certificate, published a declaration contradicting the
statement, in a document bearing date the 11th-23d June 1839, which was
printed in the Greek newspapers. The medical and military officers who
signed this counter-certificate were dismissed from all their places,
and immediately quitted Greece. Very little has been said on this
subject since. All parties seem heartily ashamed of their share in the
transaction, and the public never discovered the key of the mystery. It
is certain, however, that King Otho has given Lord Palmerston and Sir E.
Lyons good proof of the falsity of the certificate, if they were ever
led into the belief that such a document really existed; for, during ten
years, he baffled them both in every diplomatic move, and made their
vaunted constitutional policy tend more to the injury of their own
reputation than to the diminution of his power.
This episode of the certificate, whether its existence be a fact or a
fable, placed an impassable barrier between Lord Palmerston and King
Otho. Right or wrong, his Hellenic Majesty held the English foreign
secretary responsible for the publication, for he believed that the
English Government possessed the power of dragging the calumniator to
light, and that it would have used the power had the anonymous
correspondent not been protected by a powerful patron. Besides, the King
of Greece might well ask, who in England could have acquired the
knowledge which enabled this correspondent to attack the person of a
monarch under the special protection of Great Britain, without fear of
investigation or reply, unless the information came directly from some
high diplomatic authority. We need not wonder, therefore, when we find
that, from June 1839, hatred to England was the prominent feeling
displayed by the Greek court in all its relations with the British
cabinet. Lord Palmerston, finding all hope of acquiring influence in the
Greek court vain, changed his policy, and became the advocate of
constitutional government.
The revolution in 1843 afforded the British cabinet an opportunity of
putting our relations with Greece on a proper footing; but the
opportunity was lost. Instead of English influence being employed to
restore the national institutions destroyed by the Bavarians, it
supported the establishment of what is called the constitutional form of
government. One of those compilations of political commonplace which the
lawgivers of our age are ready, at a week’s notice, to prepare either
for Greenland or China, was translated from French pamphlets, and
entitled the _Constitution of Greece_. Lord Aberdeen, who was then
foreign secretary, committed as great a blunder in engaging Great
Britain to stand godfather to this constitution, as Lord Palmerston had
done in making Old England guardian to King Otho. The following are the
words in which the British Government thought fit to record its
approbation of this inane waste of time and paper,—“Her Majesty’s
Government have viewed with no less satisfaction the admirable temper
which appears to have generally prevailed in the Constituent Assembly,
throughout the whole of her deliberations on the deeply interesting and
important act on which they have been engaged. Such self-command in a
popular Assembly, convoked under very exciting and critical
circumstances, is highly creditable to the Greek nation. Nor is the
result of their labours, as a whole, less entitled to credit for the
general soundness of the constitutional principles therein established.”
This, being the deliberate opinion of a British statesman of high
character, not supposed to be infatuated by a blind love of
revolutionary doctrines, demands serious examination. Let us see,
therefore, what are the principles which received the sanction of the
British Government on this occasion. In our opinion, they are precisely
those principles that lead with certainty to political anarchy and
national demoralisation. This vaunted constitution revived no local
habits of business, re-established no parochial usages, improved no
provincial institutions, corrected no political immoralities, restored
no religious authority, and insured no education to the clergy. It
proclaimed universal suffrage to an armed people, and vote by ballot to
a mob that cannot write; and these are the principles held up to public
approbation for their _general soundness_! While, as to the proofs of
admirable temper and self-command displayed by this assembly, these
feelings were surely not expressed in the decree by which this
good-tempered assembly excluded all their countrymen, who had immigrated
to the Greek territory since the year 1828, from official employments.
There are, perhaps, some who may feel inclined to observe to us, as Rob
Roy did to his kinsman, Bailie Nicol Jarvie, when they met in the
Tolbooth of Glasgow, “Hout, tout! man, let that flee stick in the wa’;
when the dirt’s dry it will rub out.” Be it so; but there are political
blunders that leave a stain, which neither time nor repentance can
efface.
We believe that the source of Lord Aberdeen’s error arose from his wish
to treat Greece as an independent state. But Greece under the protection
of the three powers, and loaded with debt, could not be an independent
power. False appearances always produce evil consequences. Lord
Palmerston had been in too great a hurry to make the bantling monarchy
of the treaty of 1832 walk without a baby-jumper, and his rivalry with
Warwick the king-maker was not more glorious than his emulation of Mr
Winkle. He ought to have perceived that sundry Klephtopiratic
excrescences, like the protuberances on the body of a young bear,
required to be carefully licked into shape. Our Foreign Secretary
delayed the operation too long; and, when he perceived the dangers that
had resulted from his negligence, he erroneously fancied that a licking
of a different kind, applied by Admiral Parker to King Otho’s
Government, would set all right.
When the Greek monarchy was founded in 1832, it was the duty of Lord
Palmerston to have laid before Parliament detailed answers to the
following questions, as a justification of the course he had pursued in
engaging Great Britain to protect the new state, and furnish it with a
loan of £2,400,000. The questions, in perfect ignorance of which the
character of England was compromised, and the money wasted, were:—
1. What were the actual means of government in the country, and the
nature of the parochial, communal, borough, provincial and central
administrative institutions, which had enabled the Greeks to maintain a
war against Sultaun Mahmoud and Mahommed Ali for seven years? Enthusiasm
and patriotism are good words in a debate, and may explain the events of
a single campaign; but common sense tells every one that a people must
possess some administrative institutions, in order to persist in a
desperate struggle for many successive years. If Greece had no
institutions in 1832, she was clearly unfit to receive a king; and the
duty of the Three Protecting Powers was to frame a system of
administration, not to choose a monarch. But on the other hand, if the
foundations of political government already existed, it was especially
the duty of Great Britain to see that these foundations or local
institutions were improved, and not destroyed, by the new Government.
2. What were the land and sea forces necessary to maintain order on
shore, and guard the Grecian seas from piracy; and how could these
forces be immediately subjected to the system of discipline, which the
protecting powers might consider indispensable?
3. What measures were requisite, in order to enable the mass of the
population to turn their attention to profitable branches of industry
without loss of time?
And 4. What were the financial resources of the country? What was the
amount of the debts contracted by the Government during the
revolutionary war? What sum would be required to supply the deficit in
the annual expenditure for the first year of the new monarch’s reign;
and what sum would be required to be set apart annually for paying the
interest of the debts of the Greek state, now converted into a European
kingdom?
Strange as it may seem, there is not the slightest information on these
important questions in the papers laid before Parliament in 1832; and we
believe that, had Lord Palmerston taken the trouble to collect even the
limited information we have specified, before he involved Great Britain
in a guarantee of King Otho’s throne, he would have perceived that it
was not necessary to burden Greece either with a new debt or the
presence of a foreign army. Great Britain would then have prevented the
regency from destroying the existing institutions, and saved the country
from the administrative corruption that ruined the despotic royalty of
King Otho, and promises very soon to annihilate his constitutional
monarchy.
One advantage might have been obtained for Greece by the constitution of
1844, if either the Greeks or their sovereign had known how to profit by
it. The direct influence of the protecting powers in the internal
affairs of the country was greatly diminished. Unfortunately, Mr Coletti
did not avail himself of this circumstance to lead the Greeks to make
one single improvement in the interior. Not a road was made, or a packet
established. Coletti was, nevertheless, a favourite minister with King
Otho, for he fomented the King’s aversion to England, and carried on an
active warfare with Sir E. Lyons.