not hesitate to act upon the permission which Parliament has given them to trust to the holding alone as security for their money. The very fact that they are trusting to the holding alone will make their valuers all the more cautious when reporting on the value of the land upon which the public money is to be lent, and experience has now proved that if due caution be used in valuing the holding the purchase money will be quite secure without subjecting the landlord to the annoyance of accepting his purchase money piecemeal.

Not the least important provisions in Mr. Gerald Balfour's Act are those dealing with the Landed Estates Court. This is a peculiarly Irish institution; it has no counterpart in England or Scotland. It was established in order to bring to a rapid sale the estates of landlords, especially of encumbered landlords-incidentally it was empowered to collect the rents of the estates pending the proceedings to a sale. For years past it has almost ceased to be a Court of sale—it has become a colossal land agent. In the debate on Lord Ashbourne's Bill in 1885 it was stated that, even then, the sales on the Landed Estates Court had dropped from 1,500,000l. per annum to 150,000l. per The Court is choked with estates brought in nominally in order that they might be sold, but really in order that a sale might be averted, and an official receiver permanently employed to collect the rents.

annum.

The Court is now agent over probably a twelfth of the agricultural rental of Ireland, and Parliament has decided that this state of things shall not continue. Where an estate in Court is hopelessly encumbered or is one over which a receiver has been appointed, the Judge is, by section 40, empowered to request the Land Commission to cause it to be inspected and valued; and when the Land Commission shall have complied with this request the Judge of the Landed Estates Court is directed to offer to the tenants on the estate to sell their holdings to them on such terms as may seem to him just.

Before making the offer to the tenants the Judge is directed to hear all parties interested, but he can act quite independently of their consent or refusal. Upon the working out of this section by the Land Judge and the Land Commission, more than upon any other known factor, will, in my opinion, depend for years to come the success or failure of land purchase in Ireland.

GEORGE FOTTRELL.

TURKISH MISGOVERNMENT

I

THE retirement of Lord Rosebery from the Liberal leadership relieves the Radical Opposition of its chief difficulty in regard to Eastern politics, or at least makes it possible to propose a true line of conduct to the party which shall not be met by a jingo non possumus. Mr. Gladstone, Sir William Harcourt, Mr. John Morley, are always open to friendly argument where this is based on a true sympathy for liberty; and it is not, perhaps, altogether vain to remind them at times of their own past lapses where a wider interpretation of their admitted principles is pleaded for. I make bold, therefore, to put my view before them of their present Armenian agitation, to point out where I think they are in error, and to suggest what seems to me a more practical plan than any they have yet suggested for gaining the end they have in view. This I take to be the speedy relief of the Armenians from their present persecution, and an early, humane, and perhaps final, settlement of the whole Eastern Question. I believe all to be within their reach; but it can only be through their initial acknowledgment of great errors in the past, and the conversion of England, through their own conversion, to as great a work of reparation in the present.

First, then, as to their past lapses. The Liberal leaders in their pronouncements are astonished and indignant at the crimes they see perpetrated at Constantinople and in Asia Minor, at the Sultan Abdul Hamid's duplicity in the matter of reforms, at his arbitrary misgovernment, and at the Armenian blood that he has shed in torrents. I think, nevertheless, that if they would examine their own consciences a little closely, they would find that the present outrageous condition of things at Constantinople is one very largely, indeed principally, of their own contriving.

To begin at the very beginning-the Cyprus Convention and the Treaty of Berlin. It is true that out of office Mr. Gladstone and his colleagues denounced these arrangements strongly, but in office afterwards they persistently upheld and made use of them, and, indeed, on some points intensified their ill consequences. The full story of the

Cyprus double-dealing has never, I think, been told in print, and its results have been so far-reaching, and are still so vitally affecting the situation, that I will make no apology for relating its chief episode here. The story, as I remember it well at the time—and it cannot in its main facts be gainsaid-is this. When the Congress met at Berlin in the early summer of 1878, one of the first of its acts was to take from each of the Ambassadors present a declaration that he came to it with clean hands-that is to say, free of all secret engagement between his Government and any other Government represented at the Congress. This declaration Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury gave with the rest. A few days after, however, the text of the Cyprus Convention was published in London by the Globe newspaper, which had obtained it from Mr. Marvin, a man employed as translator at the Foreign Office, and who had for money betrayed it to the press. The incident was within a little of breaking up the Congress. The French and Russian Ambassadors declared themselves outraged at the English ill-faith, and M. Waddington went so far as to order his trunks to be packed for leaving Berlin. The situation was only saved by Prince Bismarck's intervention and the great personal ascendency Lord Beaconsfield had acquired at the Congress. It was compromised on the following terms of English surrender. Lord Beaconsfield agreed with M. Waddington:

1. That France, as a set-off for Cyprus, should be allowed on the first convenient pretext and without opposition from England to occupy Tunis ;

2. That, in the appointments then making in Egypt by the Finance Commission, France should march pari passu with England; and

3. That the old French claim of protecting the Latin Church in Syria should be acknowledged.

On these conditions M. Waddington was for the time detached from the Russian influence, and Lord Beaconsfield was able to return to London in triumph, having secured, according to his well-known boast, a 'Peace with Honour.' Nevertheless, the germ of the whole of our subsequent troubles in the East, including the French and Russian alliance, may be distinctly traced to the incident above related, and it is necessary to remember it now if we are to understand the full difficulty in which we are involved. Its first embarrassing result was the establishment in 1879 of the Anglo-French financial control in Egypt; its second, the violation of the Ottoman territory in Tunis, with our connivance, in 1881; the third, the failure of our moral influence with Turkey and all the Powers, leaving us charged with the fate of Asia Minor, and, at the same time, impotent to control it for good. Now, of course the initial blame in this scandalous affair was not the Liberal Party's. Mr Gladstone denounced it as strongly as the rules of official etiquette, which always screen

the worst Foreign Office deliquencies, would allow. But what I would beg Liberals to consider is, that neither in 1880, when Mr. Gladstone returned to office, nor at any subsequent period of Liberal ascendency, has the smallest serious attempt been made to undo or

repair the wrong. Mr. Gladstone in office became undistinguishable

in his treatment of the Eastern Question from Lord Beaconsfield. He neither withdrew from the responsibility in Egypt, nor refused his connivance with France when the time came for redeeming Lord Beaconsfield's bond in Tunis, nor did he abrogate the Cyprus engageAll that he did to modify his predecessor's policy was to relax the vigilance of English supervision in Asia Minor by withdrawing the perambulating Consuls Lord Salisbury had appointed, and so to leave the Armenians and other Ottoman subjects more completely than ever at the Sultan's mercy. He retained unaltered the obligations of the Convention, while neutralising its purpose-what little there was in it-for good; and, above all, and to the disappointment of everyone who had followed his noble declarations of disinterestedness out of office, he retained Cyprus, England's unholy 'backshish' in the affair. To the present day it is inexplicable to me how the great Liberal statesman of 1880 should thus have stultified his declarations and swerved from his principles.

A still stronger case for Liberal repentance is that of Mr. Gladstone's action two years later in Egypt, and one that more vitally affects the present unhappy situation among the Sultan's subjects. In 1881 and 1882 there was everywhere in the Ottoman Empire a strong movement in favour of reform. All the intelligence, all the education, all the humanity of the empire was on the side of a liberal interpretation of the Sheria, or Moslem law, of religious tolerance, and, above all, of constitutional government. Rightly or wrongly, all that was best in the empire had turned to this European panacea for a remedy. On the other side stood the reactionist fanaticism of the uneducated, the rabble of the towns, and this same Sultan Abdul Hamid. The moment was a critical one. The constitutional party, weakened by the issue of the Russian war, was being hard pressed by Abdul Hamid at Constantinople; the liberal Grand Sherif of Mecca had just been assassinated and replaced by a reactionist; the Sultan was beginning to assert his leadership of the Panislamic movement. Still the issue of the struggle was far from decided against liberty, and in Egypt, at any rate, the constitutional party were carrying all before them. They had wrung a Constitution from the Khedive, and were determined on reform. All the enlightened Moslem world, and in large measure the Christian world, too, of the Ottoman provinces were looking on, their hopes centred on the Egyptian success. It was at this critical juncture that Mr. Gladstone allowed himself to be persuaded-we all remember in what financial interests-to intervene and crush the movement. He pleaded in excuse that he was paying

a debt of honour, that he was bound by international engagements and I know not what else. What he seems, however, to have forgotten, but it is very necessary Liberals should remember it, is that in order to effect his purpose he called in the aid of the very forces of inhumanity he is now denouncing, with an effect altogether disastrous to Eastern liberty. It is on historical record that in the month of June 1882, after threatening the Egyptian nationalists in vain, Her Majesty's Government appealed to this very Sultan, Abdul Hamid, for help to crush their movement and dispose of their leader, by Oriental methods. The English Liberal press of the day even went so far as to explain that Dervish Pasha, the Sultan's right-hand man, borrowed for the occasion, was specially fitted for his work, inasmuch as he was 'notoriously unscrupulous.' It is also historical that within a few days only of Dervish's arrival in Egypt the Alexandrian riots and massacres occurred. Our ships then bombarded Alexandria; but meeting still with a national resistance, we obtained from Abdul Hamid a decree of rebellion against Arabi, armed with which our English army finally occupied Cairo. It is not too much to say that the overthrow of the Egyptian nationalists at Tel-el-Kebir, under warrant of the Sultan, and the non-fulfilment of Mr. Gladstone's promise, made through Lord Dufferin, of restoring some kind of constitutional government at Cairo, sealed the fate of liberty throughout the Ottoman Empire, and with it of all chance of internal reform.

Nor is this quite all. Abdul Hamid, supreme now over the constitutional party in Turkey, was resolved to take vengeance on the defeated Liberal leaders. In 1883, encouraged by the complicity of the Powers, including England, he had Midhat, the constitutional ex-Prime Minister, arrested and tried on a false charge of murder, brought before a packed tribunal at Constantinople, condemned, and sentenced to death. It is within my personal knowledge that English evidence of the highest official kind could have been adduced at the trial, clearing Midhat of the charge. Yet, for reasons of English state, that evidence was withheld. Midhat's sentence, momentarily commuted to perpetual imprisonment, was carried out as soon as the public had ceased to busy itself about him. By the Sultan's order he was beheaded privately in prison at Taïf, in Arabia, and his head was forwarded to Constantinople.

Things having been so in the past, however completely now forgotten (to me they are poignant and ever-living memories), I confess to a little scepticism as to the fundamental right of the Liberal leaders of the present agitation to act as justiciaries on Abdul Hamid, or to wield the sword of the Almighty' in a new crusade. I will, however, assume that in their inner consciences they acknowledge they were wrong, and are anxious seriously now to repair the ruin of the Eastern world. It is terribly late to begin. They are no longer in office. Their full opportunity is past. They are discredited in

VOL. XL-No. 237

3 K