PEACE OR WAR?

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jan 8, 1894

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 20, No. 10.

THE year 1893 ends with an uneasy feeling all over Europe. There are 130,000 more men under arms than there were last Christmas. The strain is almost more than can be borne. And business depression, which has generally been a forerunner of war, is universal. The number of unemployed men in England is larger than usual; in the mining districts poverty and debt are pressing with unusual severity. The Christmas trade has been dull not only in England, but also in France, Germany, and Austria. Italy has just gone through a ministerial crisis, and the disorder of the finances is such that Signor Zanardelli found it impossible to find a leading statesman who was willing to accept the post of Minister of Finance. France is still thrilling from the effect of the dynamite explosion in the Chamber. A new press law to crush the dynamite press, and another new law to suppress assemblages of dynamiters, were necessary, but they have added to public nervousness. England is not easy under the uncertainties of the home-rule question; Gladstone has left the problem of the House of Lords unsettled; sooner or later something will have to be done to determine whether the kingdom is run by the lords or by the people; whichever way the inbroglio is settled, there will be plenty of room for trouble.

Whenever the preparations for war are complete, and nothing is wanting but a pretext, the pretext generally turns up, and in some unsuspected place. When Napoleon had made up his mind to consolidate his empire by a war, a trumped-up dispute about the rights of the churches at Jerusalem answered the purpose; and when France and Germany had goaded each other to the fighting point, the Hohenzollern candidacy served as the chip which one knocked from the other's shoulder. There is a possibility that the pretext on this occasion may be furnished by Constantinople. It appears that the recent visit of the Russian naval officers to Paris was intended as a prelude to a Russian demonstration in the Bosphorus. This is an open secret at Constantinople, where a panic prevails, and the probable assassination of the sultan is freely predicted.

Russia proposes, it is said, to unite her Black Sea fleet with her Mediterranean fleet by sending the former through the Dardanelles in violation of the treaties. When she last uttered this threat, England moved an army corps to Cyprus and a fleet to Tenedos, while the Turks bestirred themselves to defend Constantinople. Now England is in no condition to go to war in the Mediterranean. France has ten first-class battle ships at Toulon and Carthage; if they should join the eleven battle ships which the combined Russian fleet would contain, the squadron would be far stronger than any naval force which Great Britain could assemble in the Mediterranean. Constantinople itself is defenseless. The forts would not survive a bombardment of half an hour with modern guns, and the Turkish fleet is lying within the inner horn, without coal or modern weapons of war.

There may be no purpose on the part of Russia to throw this firebrand among the combustibles of Europe. But if she did, everything is ready for war. There is a chance that Mr. Gladstone would try to keep England out of it and to leave Turkey to her fate. But Germany would understand that a junction of the Russian and French fleets in the Mediterranean meant a renewal of the Franco-German War, and young William would act accordingly. It is significant that at such a crisis Signor Crispi, Bismarck's bosom friend, should have been invited by King Humbert to form the ministry which Zanardelli has been unable to constitute.