A LESSON IN HISTORY MR CAMERON FROM 1853-5
CRIMEAN WAR
The words of this
article are those of John Bright MP-
1811-1889
*
'Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquished number!
Shake your chains to earth, like
dew
Which in sleep had fall'n on you:
Ye are many,-they are few.
SHELLY.
*
...'At this moment
England is engaged in a murderous warfare with Russia, although
the Russian Government accepted her own terms of peace, and
has been willing to accept them in a sense of England's own
interpretation of them ever since they were offered; and at the
same time England is allied with Turkey, whose Government
rejected the award of England, and who entered into the war in
opposition to the advice of England. Surely, when the Vienna
note was accepted by Russia, the Turks should have been
prevented from going to war at their own risk.'...
'...we are not only at war with Russia, but with
all the Christian population of the Turkish Empire ,and we are
building up our Eastern Policy on a false foundation-namely, on
the perpetual maintenance of the most immoral and filthy of all
despotisms over one of the fairest portions of the earth which
it has desolated, and over a population it has degraded but has
not been able to destroy.'
'Our countrymen,'
Bright wrote to a public meeting in April 1854,
'our countrymen fancy
they are fighting for freedom because the Russian
Government is a despotism: they forget that the object
of their solitude is no less a despot: that their chief
ally {Napoleon III] but the other day overthrew a
republic and imprisoned or expatriated the members of a
freely-elected Parliament; that they are alternatively
coaxing and bullying Austria, whose regard for freedom
and justice Hungary and Italy can attest ,
to join them in a holy war, and that the chief result of
their success, if success be possible, will be to
perpetuate the domination of the handful of the
followers of Mahomet over many millions of Christians
throughout the provinces of European Turkey... The
people, or a portion of them are drunk with a confused
notion of fighting with Russia; they confound the
blowing up of ships and the slaughter of thousands with
the cause of freedom, as if there were any connection in
matters wholly apart.'...
...Both he [ Lord Palmerston ] and
Russell, to the disgust of their Radical supporters,
denied that the war was to benefit either the Poles or
the Hungarians. The other country besides Turkey for
whom the Ministers declared that we were fighting
was-not Italy, still less England-but Germany,' who
herself refused to enter into the quarrel. 'Be it
remembered,' said Lord John, 'that we are seeking no
object of our own. The cause is one, in the first place,
of the independence of Turkey....It is to maintain the
independence not only of Turkey, but of Germany and of
all European nations.'
John Bright (June 1855)
seized hold of this extraordinary utterance:
'To me, 'he said, 'it
was really frightful to hear the noble Lord [Lord John]
tell the House that we are not fighting for ourselves,
but for Germany....What a notion a man must have of the
duties of the twenty-seven millions of people living in
these islands, if he thinks they ought to come
forward as the defenders of the sixty millions of people
in Germany, that the blood of England, is not the
property of the people of England, and that the sacred
treasure of the bravery, resolution ,and unfaltering
courage of the people of England is to be squandered in
a contest in which the noble Lord says we have no
interest, for the preservation of the independence of
Germany, and of the integrity, civilisation, and
something else of all Europe.'
His final summary of the
whole issue, at the end of his 'letter to Mr Absalom
Watkin' (November 1854), is a fine example of rhetoric
as the handmaid of argument.
'My doctrine would have
been non-intervention in this case. The danger of the
Russian power was a phantom; the necessity of
permanently upholding the Mahometan rule in Europe is a
absurdity. Our love for civilisation, when we subject
the Greeks and Christians to the Turks, is a sham; and
our sacrifices for freedom, when working out the behests
of the Emperor of the French and coaxing Austria to help
us, is a pitiful imposture. The evils of non
-intervention were remote and vague and could
neither be weighed nor described in any accurate terms.
The good we can judge something of already, by
estimating the cost of a contrary policy. And what
is the cost? War in the north [Baltic] and south of
Europe, threatening to involve every country of Europe.
Many, perhaps £50,000,000 sterling, in the course of
expenditure by this country alone, to be raised from the
taxes of a people whose extrication from ignorance and
poverty can only be hoped for from the continuance of
peace.
John Bright
speaking of the war taxation, he said in the House:
Gentlemen, I congratulate you, that every man of you had a Turk
upon his shoulders.' The disturbance of trade throughout the
world, the derangement of monetary affairs , and difficulties
and ruin to thousands of families. Another year of high
prices of food, notwithstanding a full harvest in England,
chiefly because war interferes with imports, and we have
declared our principle foreign food-growers to be our enemies.
The loss of human life to an enormous extent. Many
thousands of our own countrymen have already perished of
pestilence and in the field; and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of
English families will be plunged into sorrow, as a part of the
penalty to be paid for the folly of the nation and its rulers.
'When the time comes for the "inquisition for of blood"
who shall answer for these things? You have read the tidings
from the Crimea; you have, perhaps, shuddered at the slaughter;
you remember the terrific picture - I speak not of battle, and
the change, and the tumultuous excitement of the conflict, but
of the field after the battle-Russians in their frenzy or their
terror shooting Englishmen who would be offered them water to
quench their agony of thirst; Englishmen, in crowds, rifling the
pockets of the men they had slain or wounded, taking their few
shillings or roubles, and discovering among the plunder of
the stiffening corpses images of the
"Virgin and the
Child"
On January 28, while peace and war
still hung in the balance, John Bright addressed
addressed a crowded meeting of his constituents in the
Corn Exchange, Manchester, with vigour and success, but
at the close of the meeting it was remarked that he was
flushed in the face and suffering from the excitement of
the effort.' For more than two years to come he
was hors de Combat as a politician, and during the early
months of his illness it was doubtful whether he would
ever regain the use of his working facilities.
When, therefore, peace was signed in March 1850, he was
a stricken man.
The evils of war do not end with the
conclusion of peace. As late as November 1857 Bright
wrote to Villiers: 'The Russian War spent about
500,000,000 of the floating capital of Europe. I
should not mourn much if the innocent did not suffer
with the guilty. Lancashire is getting rapidly to
three days a week of
working and wages and food, and the winter promises to
be dark in more senses than one. I suppose the
Parliamentary Jester will still jest, and the
representatives of the people will still laugh.'
And again he writes to the same correspondent: 'I
suspect the hundred millions sterling we squandered in
the Russian War would be welcome now. But it can
no more be recovered than the souls of the 50,000
Englishmen who died to make Palmerston Prime Minister.
Twenty years later Bright was passing
through London with Philip his youngest boy. They
drove by the Guards' Monument in Pall Mall, one of the
few public memorials in London that show any
appositeness of feeling for the men or events
commemorated: three bearded privates in their
bearskins and greatcoats stand with heads bowed, in
sorrow for their comrades fallen at Inkerman, while a
Victory in mourning crowns them from above. No
general or statesman is honoured in the
word CRIMEA at the base. As the father and son
drove by that day, the Rochdale lad, looking out eagerly
at the great city, asked the meaning of that word.
Bright was silent for a moment, and then said 'A CRIME.'
He offered no further explanation, and the boy, a little
frightened by something in his father's voice, asked no
more, but always remembered what he did not understand.
[WE IN OUR
TIME HAVE SIMILAR CRIMES SUCH AS
AFGHANISTAN-IRAQ-LIBYA....NOTHING HAS BEEN LEARNT IN THE
FOLLOWING CENTURY AND MORE!]
'We feel that Mr Bright is entitled to a
higher eulogy than any that could be due to intellect or any
that could be due to success. Of mere success he was
indeed conspicuous example; in intellect he may lay claim to a
most distinguished place; but the character of the man lay
deeper than his intellect, deeper than his eloquence, deeper
than anything that can be described or seen on the surface, and
the supreme eulogy which is his due I apprehend to be this, that
he elevated political life to a higher level and that he thereby
bequeathed to his country the character of a statesman which can
be made the subject not only of admiration, and not only of
gratitude, but of reverential contemplation.'
Mr Gladstone in the House of
Commons, March 29, 1889.
*
More corn then came from Russia
than from America. The war sent up the price of wheat TO 72s in
1854, and 74s, in 1855(average)
LIFE OF JOHN BRIGHT by G.M
TREVELYAN-CONSTABLE AND COMPANY -LONDON-1925
*
NOVEMBER 18-2015
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