“Let me endeavor very briefly to sketch, in the rudest outline, what the Turkish race was and what it is. It is not a question of Mohammedanism simply, but of Mohammedanism compounded with the peculiar character of a race. They are not the mild Mohammedans of India, nor the chivalrous Saladins of Syria, nor the cultured Moors of Spain. They were, upon the whole, from the black day when they first entered Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity. Wherever they went, a broad line of blood marked the track behind them; and, as far as their dominion reached, civilization disappeared from view. They represented everywhere government by force as opposed to government by law. For the guide of this life they had a relentless fatalism; for its reward hereafter, a sensual paradise.
“They were, indeed, a tremendous incarnation of military power. This advancing curse menaced the whole of Europe. It was only stayed—and that not in one generation, but in many—by the heroism of the European population of those very countries part of which form at this moment the scene of war, and the anxious subject of diplomatic action. In the olden time all Western Christendom sympathized with the resistance to the common enemy; and even during the hot and fierce struggles of the Reformation there were prayers, if I mistake not, offered up in the English churches for the success of the emperor—the head of the Roman Catholic power and influence—in his struggles with the Turk.
KURDISH HAMIDIÉH SOLDIERS EXECUTING THE “SWORD DANCE.”
“But, although the Turk represented force as opposed to law, yet not even a government of force can be maintained without the aid of an intellectual element such as he did not possess. Hence there grew up what has been rare in the history of the world, a kind of tolerance in the midst of cruelty, tyranny, and rapine. Much of Christian life was contemptuously let alone, much of the subordinate functions of government was allowed to devolve upon the bishops; and a race of Greeks was attracted to Constantinople which has all along made up, in some degree, the deficiencies of Turkish Islam in the element of mind, and which at this moment provides the Porte with its long-known and, I must add, highly esteemed ambassador in London. Then there have been, from time to time, but rarely, statesmen whom we have been too ready to mistake for specimens of what Turkey might become, whereas they were, in truth, more like lusus naturæ, on the favorable side,—monsters, so to speak, of virtue or intelligence. And there were (and are) also, scattered through the community, men who were not, indeed, real citizens, but yet who have exhibited the true civic virtues, and who would have been citizens, had there been a true polity around them. Besides all this, the conduct of the race has gradually been brought more under the eye of Europe, which it has lost its power to resist or to defy; and its central government, in conforming perforce to many of the forms and traditions of civilization, has occasionally caught something of their spirit....
“I entreat my countrymen, upon whom far more than perhaps any other people of Europe it depends, to require and to insist that our government, which has been working in one direction, shall work in the other, and shall apply all its vigor to concur with the other states of Europe in obtaining the extinction of the Turkish executive power in Bulgaria. Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner—namely, by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and their Yuzbachis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas,—one and all, bag and baggage,—shall, I hope, clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned. This thorough riddance, this most blessed deliverance, is the only reparation we can make to the memory of those heaps on heaps of dead; to the violated purity alike of matron, of maiden, and of child; to the civilization which has been affronted and shamed; to the laws of God, or, if you like, of Allah; to the moral sense of mankind at large. There is not a criminal in a European jail, there is not a cannibal in the South Sea Islands, whose indignation would not arise and overboil at the recital of that which has been done; which has too late been examined, but which remains unavenged; which has left behind all the foul and all the fierce passions that produced it; and which may again spring up, in another murderous harvest, from the soil soaked and reeking with blood, and in the air tainted with every imaginable deed of crime and shame. That such things should be done once is a damning disgrace to the portion of our race which did them, that a door should be left open for their ever-so-barely possible repetition would spread that shame over the whole.[[54]] Better, we may justly tell the Sultan, almost any inconvenience, difficulty, or loss associated with Bulgaria,
‘Than thou reseated in thy place of light,
The mockery of thy people and their bane.’
“We may ransack the annals of the world; but I know not what research can furnish us with so portentous an example of the fiendish misuse of the powers established by God ‘for the punishment of evil-doers, and for the encouragement of them that do well.’ No government ever has so sinned; none has so proved itself incorrigible in sin, or, which is the same, so impotent for reformation. If it be allowable that the executive power of Turkey should renew, at this great crisis, by permission or authority of Europe, the charter of its existence in Bulgaria, then there is not on record, since the beginnings of political society, a protest that man has lodged against intolerable misgovernment, or a stroke he has dealt at loathsome tyranny, that ought not henceforth forward to be branded as a crime.”