to have not only union but a foreign prince. In this latter desire they had always had but one strong supporter, France. Russia was now so alarmed by the prospect that she withdrew her support of the union. In discussing union the matter was once more placed on the basis of the popular will. Austria and Russia, citing the recent upheaval regarding Couza as a proof of popular discontent with the existing order, now asserted that the desire of the people, especially in Moldavia, was for separation and, to ascertain this desire, they urged that the matter be again put to vote, under secure guarantees of liberty and independence.1 France and Sardinia opposed a vote on the ground that the vote of 1857 had been decisive. Cowley stated that the British government had no preconceived opinion either for or against union, and left it wholly to the people, " on whom she had never had the intention of imposing a state of affairs repugnant to them." The majority of the Powers favoring another vote, the French plenipotentiary proposed that to obviate delay it should be given by the joint assembly already gathered at Bucharest. Russia argued that greater freedom would be assured if the Moldavian deputies should vote at Jassy. Russia, however, advocated a wholly fresh appeal to the people, and was supported in this by Prussia and by Great Britain, Cowley saying that he could not understand why there should be any hesitation in consulting the populations. The method of taking the vote, whether by one or two assemblies, and by new elections or not, was finally referred to the home governments. Without waiting for the decision of the Powers, however, the Provisional Government of the Principalities settled the question by dissolving the assembly already in session and convoking a new one, and by holding a plebiscite which elected the Count of Flanders. This action brought forth bitter denunciation from the conference. The consuls in the Principalities were notified by telegraph to inform the Provisional Government that a foreign prince was impossible, that as to union if the Moldavian delegates to the new assembly requested it, they should be allowed to vote separately on the matter, and that, if their vote should be adverse, the union would be dissolved. The consuls were to exercise a joint supervision over the vote. Judging the diplomatic situation to be inauspicious, the Count of Flanders had refused his election, but the Provisional Government had not exhausted its resources. On May 17, the President read to the Conference another dispatch from the government at Bucharest announcing a second plebiscite by which Prince Charles Louis of Hohenzollern Sigmaringen had been elected, by 685,969 votes to 224. The Rumanian agents at London and Paris had 1 The protocols of this Conference may be found in Martens, N. R. G., vol. 18, pp. 166 et seq. 2 Universal manhood suffrage had been one of the reforms instituted by Couza. already ascertained that Prince Charles would be acceptable to both Great Britain and France.1 Needless to say he had also the support of Prussia. Although none of this support was voiced in the Conference, Austria and Turkey, perceiving further opposition to the union to be useless, accepted it, and, after a long and futile discussion, yielded also on the question of the foreign prince. On October 23, 1866, Prince Charles I was invested as hereditary prince over the United Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, which henceforth assumed for themselves the name of Rumania, although the name did not receive diplomatic recognition until the Principalities had gained their independence after the Russo-Turkish war in 1877, and it was not until May 22, 1881, that the coronation of Charles as King of Rumania took place at Bucharest. THE IONIAN ISLANDS, 1863 The year 1863 was marked by an event unique in the annals of European diplomacy. A great empire, coveting maritime and commercial supremacy in the East, voluntarily relinquished a most commanding position, held there by undisputed right of treaty, and ceded to another nation what was thought to be one of the strongest fortresses in the world; 2 and the cession is still more noteworthy for the fact that it was made under the stipulation that the people themselves should, through their elected assembly, sanction the act. However accurately the cynical may attribute this act to complex diplomatic causes, it remains the highwater mark of the liberal era of Great Britain's foreign policy. Before the British Protectorate, which was instituted in the general rearrangement of Europe in 1815, the seven Ionian Islands, Corfu, Cephalonia, Ithaca, Santa Maura (Leucas), Zante, Cerigo and Paxo, scattered along the coast of Greece from Epirus to the extreme south of the Morea, had known many masters. For four centuries they had been under the harsh dominion of the Venetian Republic, when, in 1797, the overflowing current of the French Revolution caught up the Islands and carried them rapidly through kaleidoscopic changes of sovereignty; first the Directory, by the Treaty of CampoFormio in 1797; then a joint Russo-Turkish protectorate, under whose loosening grasp the Islands managed to obtain recognition as the Septinsular Republic, in the Treaty of Amiens in 1802; then, by the Treaty of Tilsit in 1809, back to Napoleon, under whom they remained for the brief period before they were seized by the British during the operations of the war and 1 Sturdza, Charles I, roi de Roumanie, vol. 1, p. 46. 2 George William Hamilton Fitzmaurice, Viscount Kirkwall (sixth Earl of Orkney), Four Years in the Ionian Islands — Kirkwall, writing in 1864, says that Corfu is still unrivalled as the strongest and most valuable of eastern fortresses - vol. 1, p. 48. - put under a British administration. Their fate for the next fifty years was at last settled by the Treaty of Paris, signed on November 5, 1815. By the Treaty of Paris, Great Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia again recognized the Islands as a republic under the name of the "United States of the Ionian Islands," and declared them to be a single, free, and independent State. In order to keep them out of more dubious hands, however, and to remove them from the international chess table, they were placed under the immediate and exclusive protection of Great Britain. The "mandatory," anticipating from the charge a thankless burden, gave reluctant acceptance, so the historians say; 2 yet the strategic position of the Islands must needs have been of the first importance to a World Power, and the right to occupy forts and territories was expressly given by Article 5. Nor was the independence of the Islands so apparent at the end of the treaty as at the beginning, for the power of the new State to regulate its internal organization was to be "with the approval of the protecting Power "3 which was "to dedicate its particular solicitude to the legislation and general administration of the State," and to appoint a resident Lord High Commissioner invested with authority sufficient for the purpose. To this Lord High Commissioner were given practically unlimited powers regarding the convocation and direction of the assembly, and the Constitution of 1817, by the simple device of enabling the government to nominate the delegates to the Assembly and depriving the Assembly of power over supplies or ministers, enabled the Lord High Commissioner to do whatever he pleased.* With such a despotic system, established by an alien ruler, it is surprising that, in spite of the resurgence of Greek nationalism on the mainland in 1821 and the success of the Greek War of Independence which culminated in the acknowledgment of the independence of the Greek kingdom in 1832, there should have been, until 1840, only a small party in the Islands actively against the British protectorate, and scarcely any movement to join in the new Greek kingdom. This was probably due not only to the unpopularity of Otto, the Bavarian king of Greece, but to the economic conditions in the Islands, which emphasized the lack of racial solidarity; for, although the lower classes were overwhelmingly Greek in race and language, the aristocracy, especially in Corfu, was largely Italian, and appears to have cared more for the perpetuation of its control over the peasantry, so recently serfs, than for self-governMoreover, the protecting Power, by its appointment of vast numbers 1 Corfu did not surrender until 1814. 2 Cf. Dispatch of Earl Russell to the British Representatives. Documents, post, p. 844, for an explanation of the choice of Great Britain as protector. 3 Article 3. State Papers, vol. 3, pp. 250 et seq. 4 Cf. John Morley, Life of William Ewart Gladstone, vol. 1, p. 598. of native officials as well as by its conservative constitution, had tied the aristocracy to its interests. The smouldering hatred of the Protectorate, however, always strong with the peasantry and the small tradesmen, was at last linked with the new spirit of nationalism kindled by the Greek revolution of 1843, and when, in 1844, there arose in the Islands a party with union with Greece as its platform, it rapidly swept all before it. Alarmed at the growth of this party, as well as at the spread of the revolutionary fever of 1848, the Lord High Commissioner, left free by the custom of the Foreign Office to institute his own policy, attempted to forestall unrest in the Islands by granting freedom of the press and a more liberal constitution. The size of the Assembly was increased and the election of its members was made free from government control; the ballot was restored and the electorate trebled, and eventually quadrupled, by reducing the requisite qualifications. But, while the press and parliament were thus liberated, the executive power was fixed more firmly than ever in the hands of the Lord High Commissioner.1 The Assembly was still unable to stop supplies or eject ministers. Its only means of protest was to vote against the introduction of any government measure whatsoever, and this, with the passing of resolutions for the union with Greece, became the principal occupation of the Ionian Assembly.2 The electoral reforms of 1849 seem to have completely destroyed the government's control over the Assembly, by placing the new Assembly in the hands of the Unionists. The several complaints against the Protectorate now all became vocal. It had been a cause of irritation that, in spite of early pledges, Italian and not Greek had been retained as the official language, and that even now, when Greek had gained official status, not one of the "Residents" sent out from England to rule the several islands could speak a word of it. Taxation was neither uniform nor wise. The Assembly, deprived of all constitutional means by which to express their many grudges, adopted the "insolent practice" of admitting a priest to purify the assembly hall after the departure of the Lord High Commissioner. With such an inauspicious beginning, it is not surprising to find the succeeding Commissioners frequently proroguing the body to stop its "treasonable" motions. More than that, in spite of the alleged freedom of the press, they imprisoned some of the 1 Kirkwall, vol. 1, p. 175. 2 This attempt to combine repression and constitutional reform again incurred Gladstone's satirical metaphor of lighting the fire and stopping up the chimney, which he had applied to British policy in the Principalities. Morley, vol. 1, p. 598, imputes the authorship of the simile to Charles Buller. 3 Kirkwall, vol. 2, p. 296. Viscount Kirkwall had been a member of the staff of Sir Henry Ward, Seventh Lord High Commissioner. He remained in the islands until after the vote for union with Greece. editors of the Island newspapers, which were all unionist, thus increasing discontent. The faults of the system, unworkable enough at best, were clearly shown in an agrarian rising in Cephalonia, when the atrocities on both sides called forth from England's enemies taunts as to the English charges against Bourbon rule in Naples.1 Liberal thought in England, with its admirable and unrivalled ability to see the mote in its own eye as well as the beam in the eye of another, had long before this become alive to the injustice of the arrangement, if not to the national aspirations of the Ionians. It now demanded a cessation of the scandal and a special mission was dispatched to the Islands in 1859. The mission was headed by Gladstone, "whose renown as a Homeric scholar " would "justly commend him to the sympathies of an Hellenic race." 2 On November 24, 1858, Gladstone arrived at Corfu. His coming had created a sensation in the Islands and had greatly excited the hopes of the Unionists. Although, soon after landing, he took care to inform the islanders that he had not come to effect any change in the terms of the Treaty of Paris, nevertheless, the people were convinced that he had come to aid the union, and everywhere on his pilgrimage through the Islands he was met with the cries of "Union with Greece " and "Down with the Protectorate." Yet, as the Ionian gentlemen, noted for their politeness, and the officials, alarmed at such contretemps, disowned these proceedings, he seems to have believed that the cries represented only a small minority. He proceeded to state explicitly that there was no thought of union, and, at his request, the shouting ceased, but the feeling remained. It had, indeed, gained added intensity from a dispatch of the resident Lord High Commissioner, Sir John Young, in which he had recommended that Corfu and Paxo, with the consent of their inhabitants (which he declared to be probable), should be constituted British colonies. This had been stolen from the Foreign Office and made public a short time before Gladstone's arrival. It was in fact the opinion of the British officials in the Islands that the only alternative to making Corfu a British colony was a cession of the Islands to Greece. Gladstone was determined against either alternative, yet he clearly perceived many faults in the existing system. He found that the British severities in Cephalonia, the contempt frequently shown for the religion of the people, and the lack of understanding shown by the British press, which called the Ionians brigands, pirates and 1 It was the opinion in southern Europe that British rule in the islands was on a level with Austrian rule at Venice and the rule of the Cardinals in the Pontifical States. Morley, vol. 1, p. 616. 2 From the dispatch of the Colonial Minister, November 1st, 1858. Kirkwall, vol. 1, p. 216. 3 Ibid., pp. 221-2. |