Punch (73.1877)

Jolt 21 1877.]

PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI.

15

A RENCONTRE.

Mrs. H. (wishing to economise) takes an early Morning Train to the American Meat Store. Mrs. H.'s West-End
Butcher (who sells only " Prime English " Meat) has, for some mysterious Reason, come to the same Place. They
m eet— Table a u!

Inflexible, in the matter of which the Government has' shown itself
of more flexibility than stability, and grants an unofficial Com-
mittee to report on that much-discussed ship—

" Quicquid agunt homines votum, timor, ira, voluptaa,
Gaudia, discursus, nostri farrago reporti."

After the Lower Chamber's Miscellany came the Second Reading of
Lord Carnarvon's skeleton South Africa Bill, not sweetened by the
hint that some £100,000 will be wanted at once to meet the expenses
of Transvaal Annexation of which Mr. Lowther gave the history,
which is at the same time the justification.

Mr. Courtney and Sir C. Dilke think the Annexation a blunder,
if not worse. It is always well that such acts should be well
threshed out; and that, as in the canonisation of a Saint there is an
advocatus diaboli to set forth all the reasons against Saintship? there
should be Parliamentary Protesters to pick all the holes possible in
a proceeding as open to question as most Annexations. But, after
taking tent of all the holes that Mr. Courtney and the acute Chelsea
Baronet can pick. Punch believes the Transvaal Annexation will
hold water—imprimis, as a necessity for the safety of British South
African Dominion, and, secondly, as for the good, not only in the
long run, but immediately, of both Dutch Boers and South African
Natives—brown, whitey-brown, and yellow—Caflres, Totties, Bush-
men, and Afrikanders alike ; both the matter and manner of which
reflect honour on Sir Theophilus Shepstone and credit on Lord
Carnarvon.

> Mr. Rylands was down on the cost of buildings and administra-
tion in Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum; and Mr. Cross, ad-
mitting that the cost of the Asylum was enormous, promised to look
into it. For once Rylands scores a point.

Mr. Shaw-Lefevre raised a matter that sorely wants raising—
our Consular Service in Turkey. It is hard not to feel that
there is but too much foundation for his charge against our Consul
in Bosnia, of passionate Philo-Turkism, and obstinate injustice
to the Bosnian rebels against Turkish oppression, whom the
Consul's reports (made on Turkish authority, not personal investi-
gation) represent as " brigands " unworthy of sympathy. Judging

by all recent unofficial record, if there be a region of European
Turkey, after Montenegro, in which honest and well-informed
English sympathy would be safe to centre, it is Bosnia and the
Herzegovina, where the Rayahs, at their own risk and the risk of
all near and dear to them, have left their homes and braved cold,
hunger, danger, and death in battle, on the hill-side, and, worse
than either, in the Turkish prisons or at the hands of the Turkish;
tormentor, rather than bear the unspeakable oppression and inde-
scribable outrage of Ottoman mis-rule. These men are fighting a,
good fight, and we do not wonder that it has roused even the calm
wisdom of Mr. Shaw-Lefevre to see them described as "brigands"
and " filibusters," roused to revolt not by domestic oppression but
by foreign intrigue.

Happily we have in Bosnia one Freeman at least, able and willing
to sympathise with freemen, and his picture is there to correct
the other by. Of course Mr. Bourke, as in Foreign Office duty
bound, defended our Bosnian Consul. But facts are stranger
than Foreign Office instructions; and if our Consul, speaking on
Turkish authority, reports facts, then the statements of Mr. Evans,
Misses Irby and Mutr-Mackenzie and Mr. Stillman, who have
perambulated these regions expressly to study and report from
observation the state of the people and their treatment by their
rulers, are fictions : Which conclusion is the more probable ? Let
us hope the days are gone, or going, by, when it was an instruction
to English Consuls to paint the Turks in couleur de rose.

Perhaps, however, the spirit of those days in the Foreign Office may
survive Ottoman Rule in Bosnia. But with the Turks out of Euro-
pean Turkey as rulers, we can put up with any amount of them in
that little European Turkey over in Downing Street. It is when the
Turks here and the Turks there play into each other's hands, that
mischief is made. One point in conclusion; our Consul in Bosnia, Mr.
Lowther said, had been forty-one years in the service. Surely he
has earned his retiring pension, or, at all events, an easier berth than
Bosnia in times like these. He can't be good for much in the
saddle over such roads as travellers in those parts describe; and how
else is he to get about ? and. how but by getting about is he to learn
the truth, surrounded by those great masters in the art of lying and