The Treaty of San Stefano had relieved from the yoke of Turkish
administration four and a half millions of people, and made them into
a Bulgarian province. With regard to one and a quarter millions of
those people who inhabited a country called Macedonia, we at the
Treaty of Berlin, by virtue of your six millions--see how it was used
to obtain 'peace with honour'!--we threw back that Macedonia from the
free precinct into which it was to be introduced for self-government
along with the rest of Bulgaria, and we put it back into the hands of
the Sultan of Turkey, to remain in exactly the same condition in which
it had been before the war.
Well, gentlemen, I won't speak of India. I have spoken of India
elsewhere. I won't speak of various things that I might enter upon,
but one thing I must mention which I have never taken the opportunity
of mentioning in Scotland, and that was the manner in which, those
proceedings are justified. I am going now to refer to a speech of the
present Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Lord Salisbury. He was meeting
an allegation some opponent had made, that it was wrong to take the
island of Cyprus; and he justified himself by an appeal to history for
once, which is, however, a rare thing with him. But he made out his
case in this way: 'Take the island of Cyprus? Of course we took the
island of Cyprus. Wherever there is a great European controversy
localized in some portion of the great European region, we always step
in and appropriate some territory in the very heart of the place where
that controversy raged.
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