The same may be said of Egypt, but there the priesthood seem less intolerant, and the Arabs more submissive still than those of Asia. Under such circumstances it is evident that insurrections are not to be expected from them. If a revolution come it will be by one of the courtiers, the military leader, or the chief priest, and from such revolutions any real or permanent improvement of the country is not to be expected. This extreme submissiveness of the population really renders the power of an Eastern ruler extremely unstable, no matter how powerful and absolute he may be for the time.
In judging of the Turkish Government, therefore, we should bear this state of things in mind. It may be that the great massacre of the Christians in Damascus and the Lebanons in 1860 was planned and carried out with neither the knowledge nor approval of the Sultan, and the same may be said of the recent massacre at Salonica and those in Bulgaria, many of the victims of which yet lie unburied; but all of them prove the uncontrollable fierceness of Moslem fanaticism. England should not permit the Government or its representatives in Constantinople either to conceal or deny the facts, but to actively search out and expose them, which they certainly have not done. To conceal or ignore them will undoubtedly encourage their repetition, and perhaps convince the Turkish subjects that England, after all, has some reason for being secretly not over-much displeased at their occurrence!
But while England may abstain from helping Turkey either with material aid or encouragement in Europe, might she not render valuable service to Turkey as well as to humanity and progress by lending her powerful aid in promoting great improvement works in Asia? I have already[16] pointed out one of primary importance, both politically and commercially, which seems to lie very much to her hand.
P.S.—22nd September, 1876.—Since the above was in print I have read Earl Derby’s defence of the Government policy towards Turkey. It will be a serious misfortune if this question be made a party one, for which there are certainly no good grounds. The present Government seems merely to have been carrying out the old Palmerstonian policy of maintaining Turkey, not from any approval of that effete Power, but simply as a bulwark against Russia’s aggression, for in this policy all political parties have long acquiesced, and it seems unfair to blame the Government for the recent deplorable events in the European provinces.
But they have evidently erred in not being the first to see what recent events have clearly proved, that the Turks are not only bankrupt and effete, but, as proved by the Bulgarian atrocities, incurably barbarous, beastly, and cruel. An opportunity has occurred, and that by the fault of the Turks themselves, for England to free herself from the support of a people who have broken all promises and whose hands are reeking with rapine and blood. Surely the Government of Queen Victoria, confessedly the most benign sovereign the world has ever seen, will not fail to avail themselves of it. In their anxiety to maintain the “peace of Europe” they may miss it; but can the peace of Europe be maintained by England in the face of the world, even if desirable to do so, which it surely is not? For were England, either alone or with the Great Powers, to insist upon maintaining the statu quo it would simply be to prevent (of course by war if necessary) all or any reformation in these States and provinces, and render any revolution by their wretchedly downtrodden people impossible. Let us think what that means. How would Scotchmen have liked such interference in the patriotic uprisings of Wallace and Bruce, and how would Englishmen have tolerated the interference of the European Powers with our great revolution of 1688?
The Turks are the same as ever they were, but their military prowess is gone. They can no longer wage war with their enemies, but can, as of old, use their scimitars against women and children—their own subjects! Without going back beyond the present century, Châteaubriand, in his travels in Eastern Europe (1806), relates several instances of Turkish government. A Greek girl in the village of St. Paul’s, having lost her father and mother, and having been left a small fortune, received an education superior to her neighbours. For this, or other cause, the villagers became violently prejudiced against her, and resolved to get rid of her. They first raised a sum fixed by the Turkish law for the murder of a Christian woman; then they broke by night into the house of their devoted victim, whom they butchered. Thereon one of them hastened to the Pasha with the price of blood! Not content with the usual sum, he the same day despatched two janissaries to “demand an additional contribution, which caused an extraordinary sensation, not because of the atrocity of the deed, but of the greediness of the Pasha!” Greece, although now free, has as a people not much to boast of; perhaps a long series of years of Turkish oppression may have demoralized them, but certainly she has obtained a better government, thanks to English sympathy and aid. Here are other specimens of Turkish government in Europe in those days. I again use the words of the eloquent Frenchman: “The Peloponnese is a desert; the Turkish yoke has borne with increased weight on the Morea, and part of its population has been slaughtered by the Albanians. Nothing meets the eye but villages destroyed by fire and sword. Grinding oppression, outrages of every kind, complete the destruction of agriculture and human life. To drive a peasant from his cabin, to carry off his wife and children, to put him to death on the slightest pretext, is mere sport with the Aga of the meanest village.” “Reduced to misery, the Morean abandons his native land, and repairs to Asia in quest of a less severe Aga. Vain hope! He cannot escape his destiny; there he finds other Cadis and other Pashas.” “What had become of that altar consecrated to Pity which once stood in the midst of the public place at Athens, and to which her [heathen] votaries suspended locks of their hair?” This as to the governed; let us see what is the character and refinement of the governors. “This Disdar, or governor, of Athens resides in the citadel, filled with the masterpieces of Phidias, without inquiring what nation left these remains, without deigning to step beyond the threshold of the paltry habitation he has built for himself under the ruins of the monuments of Pericles, except very rarely, when this automaton shuffles to the door of his den, squats cross-legged on a dirty carpet, and while the smoke from his pipe ascends between the columns of the temple of Minerva, eyes with vacant stare the shores of Salamis and the sea of Epidaurus!” Again a heathen “proconsul might be a monster of lust, of avarice, and of cruelty, but all the proconsuls did not delight systematically and from a spirit of religion in overthrowing the monuments of civilization and the arts, in cutting down trees, in destroying harvests—and this is done by the Turks every day. Is it conceivable that tyrants should exist so absurd as to oppose every improvement in things of the first necessity?” “A bridge falls—it is not built up again. A man repairs his house—he becomes a victim of extortion.”
This refers to 1806; have the Turks changed since? Look at the massacre of the Christians in Damascus and the Lebanons in 1860, when fifteen thousand defenceless men, women, and children were treacherously murdered in cold blood. The European Powers were then roused to indignation, and a French army was despatched to investigate the case. It was never fully explained, the Government at Constantinople denied all guilt, even knowledge of it, and threw the whole blame upon the Druses, a warlike sect at variance with the Maronites, but it was proved that the signal for the slaughter was given by the Turkish Governor of Damascus. The French would not be altogether cajoled, so the Governor was sacrificed, justly, no doubt, but what reparation can be made for such a hecatomb of human lives? That the same scene has not occurred again we have perhaps to thank the visit of the French army and the precautions then enforced upon Turkey. Then look at the sad loss of human life in Asia Minor last year from famine. What did the governors do to mitigate it? Nay, would the sufferings of these wretched people have been known at all could they have concealed them?
Who shall tell how many perished with hunger? American and English residents sounded the first alarm and distributed alms—alas, in many cases too late. The Constantinople Government were shamed into action at last, but it was said that their tax-gatherers were at the same time seizing the seed corn of the famishing people, as well as the half-starved animals they had for tilling their fields! This year we had the treacherous assassinations at Salonica, remarkable chiefly as showing the blind and uncontrollable fury of the Moslems, and then even when engaged in making abject apologies for the crime, and punishing (under dread of the French and Prussian war-ships) the perpetrators, their generals were busy committing new atrocities in the Christian provinces absolutely diabolical—unheard-of for wickedness.
Was ever such an indictment made up against any other Power? The insolence of Theodore of Abyssinia, the despot of Coomassie, or even this new mighty highness of Dahomey cannot approach the effrontery of the Turks, and this too in return for unprecedented kindness and indulgence on the part of Great Britain, and in the face of solemn promises of reformation and reform made again and again—only to be shamelessly broken. History affords no parallel to it, nor is it easy to find even an illustration of this audacity of the Turks on the one hand, or of the simplicity and willing blindness of the English Government, their money lenders, and people on the other. The lying fat knight and the silly dame of Eastcheap somewhat approach it, but dramatic story is not sufficiently serious for such a subject. Long suffering is a Christian virtue, and charity is beautiful—covering a multitude of sins—but when its repetition again and again only fosters offences into ranker and unspeakable grossness, even forbearance becomes a crime—in this case against the world at large.
Disguise it as they may, the Turks are slaveholders. They hold all women, under whatever name they may call them, slaves. For politic reasons they are not to be detected selling them, but their traffic in the buying of them can scarcely be concealed. The slavery formerly existing in the Southern States of America, against which Englishmen so loudly and properly declaimed, was less debasing in practice, because the Turkish women are not only enslaved, but imprisoned in cages of stone. This fact lies, I believe, at the root of the visible declension of the Turkish power and the effeminacy of the race, and not only so, but is, I have no doubt, the producing cause of that abyss of utter worthlessness and shamelessness of character into which they have sank. The unacknowledged but most potent influence for good of the gentler sex is lost to them as a community. They lock up the greatest civilizers of the world, without whom we must all eventually return to a state worse than that of the savage. They as it were shut out the light and genial influence of the sun of their social life, cast away the one earthly sweetener of the bitter waters of Marah—and so, besides debasing the family affections, destroy those feelings of compassion and friendship, and consideration which they owe to their fellow men. It is obvious such an unfeeling state of mind will qualify them for the committal of almost any crime, and explains somewhat their surprise that the world should complain of them.