Alexandria and her Schools | Page 5

justice to myself, to guard against any mistake about my meaning or
supposition that I consider the Turkish empire a righteous thing, or one
likely to stand much longer on the face of God's earth.
The Turkish empire, as it now exists, seems to me an altogether
unrighteous and worthless thing. It stands no longer upon the assertion
of the great truth of Islam, but on the merest brute force and oppression.

It has long since lost the only excuse which one race can have for
holding another in subjection; that which we have for taking on
ourselves the tutelage of the Hindoos, and which Rome had for its
tutelage of the Syrians and Egyptians; namely, the governing with
tolerable justice those who cannot govern themselves, and making them
better and more prosperous people, by compelling them to submit to
law. I do not know when this excuse is a sufficient one. God showed
that it was so for several centuries in the case of the Romans; God will
show whether it is in the case of our Indian empire: but this I say, that
the Turkish empire has not even that excuse to plead; as is proved by
the patent fact that the whole East, the very garden of the old world, has
become a desert and a ruin under the upas-blight of their government.
As for the regeneration of Turkey, it is a question whether the
regeneration of any nation which has sunk, not into mere valiant
savagery, but into effete and profligate luxury, is possible. Still more is
it a question whether a regeneration can be effected, not by the rise of a
new spiritual idea (as in the case of the Koreish), but simply by more
perfect material appliances, and commercial prudence. History gives no
instance, it seems to me, of either case; and if our attempt to regenerate
Greece by freeing it has been an utter failure, much more, it seems to
me, would any such attempt fail in the case of the Turkish race. For
what can be done with a people which has lost the one great quality
which was the tenure of its existence, its military skill? Let any one
read the accounts of the Turkish armies in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and
seventeenth centuries, when they were the tutors and models of all
Europe in the art of war, and then consider the fact that those very
armies require now to be officered by foreign adventurers, in order to
make them capable of even keeping together, and let him ask himself
seriously, whether such a fall can ever be recovered. When, in the age
of Theodosius, and again in that of Justinian, the Roman armies had
fallen into the same state; when the Italian legions required to be led by
Stilicho the Vandal, and the Byzantine by Belisar the Sclav and Narses
the Persian, the end of all things was at hand, and came; as it will come
soon to Turkey.
But if Turkey deserves to fall, and must fall, it must not fall by our
treachery. Its sins will surely be avenged upon it: but wrong must not
avenge wrong, or the penalty is only passed on from one sinner to

another. Whatsoever element of good is left in the Turk, to that we
must appeal as our only means, if not of saving him, still of helping
him to a quiet euthanasia, and absorption into a worthier race of
successors. He is said (I know not how truly) to have one virtue left;
that of faithfulness to his word. Only by showing him that we too abhor
treachery and bad faith, can we either do him good, or take a safe
standing-ground in our own peril. And this we have done; and for this
we shall be rewarded. But this is surely not all our duty. Even if we
should be able to make the civil and religious freedom of the Eastern
Christians the price of our assistance to the Mussulman, the struggle
will not be over; for Russia will still be what she has always been, and
the northern Anarch will be checked, only to return to the contest with
fiercer lust of aggrandisement, to enact the part of a new Macedon,
against a new Greece, divided, not united, by the treacherous bond of
that balance of power, which is but war under the guise of peace.
Europe needs a holier and more spiritual, and therefore a stronger union,
than can be given by armed neutralities, and the so-called cause of
order. She needs such a bond as in the Elizabethan age united the free
states of Europe against the Anarch of Spain, and delivered the Western
nations from a rising world-tyranny, which promised to be even more
hideous than the