Bow Street Lessons.

 There are few subjects more curious than the relations between detective police-officers and those whom, for want of a better word we may perhaps call their prey ; but there is something even more curious in the contrast between the opinions entertained about both classes by the lower section of London society and by that upper portion which takes so many of its ideas from literature. The crowd which daily surrounds Sir James Ingham's police court regularly receives with cheers a series of convicts in their prison dress who admit themselves to have been guilty of one of tho most impudent of modern frauds, and the same mob is said to be kept with difficulty from roughly handling four as yet unconvicted detectives and a solicitor associated with them. But everybody who reads a novel is aware that until the other day it was difficult to get to the end of the third volume without coming upon a detective officer who walked among criminals like the lady among Comus and his crew — chaining them, however, to their seat instead of being chained himself. The literary apotheosis of the detective appears to have been of French origin. A great French novelist, who had employed supernatural agency with great effect in his earlier books, found afterwards a substitute for it in the administration of French justice and in the secrets of Parisian medicine. In several of Balzac's romances the police agent or the doctor is as much a wizard as ever was Michael Scott. The forces by which he acts are absolutely mysterious and inscrutable. Other French writers since Balzac have so worn threadbare the subject of police investigation that its interest is nearly gone ; but we have seen it remarked by French writers of another stamp that Balzac and Gaboriau have caused sensible mischief to the community by encouraging the tyranny of French inquisitorial procedure before trial. Dickens is the undoubted parent of the fictitious English detective characterised by a number of homely virtues and a never failing sagacity, but he probably got the hint from France. A crowd of copyists have vulgarised the type, and one eminent writer tried to reverse current notions by creating a detective who was positively stupid, but on the whole nobody till the other day thought it was possible to bring a charge against the morality or incorruptibility of detective policemen. It would be very unjust to the officers whose case is under investigation to assert that any such charge has as yet been established, but much which is undisputed in the evidence shows that the literary conception of detectives and of their relations with criminals has been singularly wide of the truth.

 The view taken of policemen, and especially of detective policemen, by classes which have not yet risen to the perusal of Dickens is manifestly of a wholly different kind from that of the novelist. Probably we should pretty accurately express the fact by saying that these classes look upon a policeman much as those socially above them look upon an executioner, A moment's thought will show that this distaste for policemen is extremely natural. A poor man may be perfectly honest, but he necessarily lives in much closer contact with dishonesty than a rich man. If a scandal arises in a family belonging to the class conventionally known as respectable, it is very rarely through a breach of the sixth or the eighth commandment. But it must constantly, or not unfrequently, happen to a working man that somebody nearly connected with him gets into " trouble." Thus the intervention of the law, to investigate, try, and punish theft for violence seems to him an evil, though it be an intelligible and necessary evil. It may be true that, as some political writers have contended, the poor man receives a greater amount of protection from the law than the rich; but the arguments by which the conclusion is reached are not by any means obvious, and certainly not obvious enough to make the agents of the law a popular class of men. Possibly, too, that ready obligingness which has made the English policeman the admiration of travelling foreigners fails him not a little in poor neighbourhoods, where the drunken rowdy with a bludgeon is apt to lie in wait for him. However that may be, if the ordinary policeman (as Colonel Henderson's Report broadly hints) is not by any means a popular personage among the lower class of Londoners, the detective police man may well be believed to have their strong detestation. Not only does he seem an adversary, but an adversary who never fights fairly. All the labyrinthine contrivances and ingenious disguises which charm the novel-reader must seem to the criminal classes like explosive bullets in war, and to those necessarily in some degree of contact with criminals like so much foul play. In higher spheres of society one of the most heinous of offences is to cheat at cards ; but there are men who have never been forgiven for successfully worming themselves into the confidence of the person they wished to expose. In point of fact the agent of justice is always unpopular when the justice is of such a kind that we or our associates may conceivably come into contact with it; and when this agent works by means which (but for their object) would be gross deceptions, he is quite sure to be heartily hated. The true reason why the French agent de surete and the English detective have at some time or other interested us so profoundly in books is that their proceedings are so far removed from us. But to the class which furnishes the crowd that surrounds the police court the frauds of Kurr and Benson are rather brilliant samples of the offences into which a friend or a connection may be betrayed. These frauds like all others of similar distinction, were traced to their authors by the wiles of detective policemen ; and now a gallant attempt is being made to get the biter bit.

 Besides suggesting these contradictions of opinion in that miscellaneous body called the British public, the inquiry before Sir James Ingham throws a great deal of light on some portions of British character not always understood. Have any of us quite realized the depth of the interest which (as these proceedings show) great multitudes of Englishmen take in gambling and betting ? It would be foolish to suppose that the taste is confined to the parts of English society which had their weaknesses exposed in the police-court. Common rumor must be unusually mendacious if the loss or gain of great sums on games of chance, or of mixed chance and skill, is rarer than it was among men who no doubt can on the whole afford to lose their money ; in fact, there is no reasonable doubt that Englishmen gamble very nearly as much as they ever did, though there is a larger element of skill in the games on which they stake their ventures. But comparatively few of us have been aware how widely the passion for gambling spreads among the classes on whose tastes and sympathies a whole flood of light has been thrown by the case of the detectives. It would seem as if the great mass of Englishmen below the decorous dissenting portion of the middle class cared for nothing so heartily as a race and a bet. One cannot help asking oneself what has been the real effect on national morality of the series of enactments by which the Legislature, apparently in all honesty, has aimed at suppressing what it must think a great public and private vice. So far as the upper classes are concerned, the merely mechanical apparatus of gambling has ceased to exist, or, if it exists, hides in the darkest corners. The rouge-et-noir, roulette, and hazard tables have disappeared ; dice are all but unknown. The public gaming-room, kept for the profit of its owner, has dropped out of English recollection. A gentleman started on the road to ruin must confine him self to his own or his friend's house, or to the club in which he has the interest of a quasi-partner. And he can only lose his money by backing his own or somebody else's skill at cards, or by venturing to have an opinion on the law of heredity as manifested in racehorses, But perhaps he contrives to lose in this way quite as much as his grandfather lost after the fashion of that time. As respects the part of the population which cannot by any straining of language be included in the upper classes, the organization of gambling by betting agencies seems to have been effectually put down or prevented by the law ; and this we suspect to have been the sole clear gain from a long course of legislation. It is rather more difficult for the city clerk or apprentice to lose money than it would be if gambling were legal, and he is now better protected than he once was against the rapacity of persons who,like the convicts just examined, have sharper wits than his. But in one great object, perhaps the greatest of its objects, the law has wholly failed. It has not succeeded, as many penal laws have succeeded, in creating a popular sentiment adverse to the practice, at which it is aimed. The Englishmen of our day strongly reprobate duelling, and their disapproval dates from the time when the law against it was really enforced. But though the whole law against gambling seems to be put in force, neither the British public nor, as would appear, the British, police can be brought to regard it as seriously immoral. — Pall Mall Budget.

Herald (Melbourne, Vic. ), 1877 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article244523168

DISRAELI AND DICKENS.

 Disraeli, long known as a brilliant satirist and romance writer, before he was elevated to the lead of the House of Commons, is an author different from either Mr. James or Sir E. Bulwer Lytton, but with merits of a very high description. He is not feudal and pictorial, like the first, nor profound and tender, like the last ; he is more political and discursive than either. He has great powers of description, an admirable talent for dialogue, and remarkable force, as well as truth, in the delineation of character. His novels are constructed, so far as the story goes, on the two dramatic principles, and the interest sustained with true dramatic effect. His mind is essentially of a reflective character; his novels are, in a great degree, pictures of public men or parties in political life. He has many strong opinions —perhaps some singular prepossessions —and his imaginative works are, in a great degree, the vehicle for their transmission. To any one who studies them with attention, it will not appear surprising, that he should be even more eminent in public life than in the realms of imagination; that the brilliant author of " Coningsby" should be the dreaded debater in the House of Commons—of "Vivian Grey," the able and lucid Chancellor of the Exchequer. His career affords a striking example of the truth of Dr. Johnson's observation, that what is usually called particular genius is nothing but strong natural parts accidentally turned into one direction and that when nature has conferred powers of the highest description, chance or supreme direction alone determines what course their possessor is to follow. The strong turn which romance and novel writing, in the first half of the nineteenth century, took to the delineation of high life, which its charms, its vices, and its follies, naturally led to a reaction, and a school arose, the leaders of which, discarding all attempts at patrician painting,aimed at the representation of the manners, customs, ideas, and habits of middle and low life. The field thus opened was immense, and great abilities were eagerly turned to its cultivation. At the very head of this school, both in point of time and talents, must be placed Mr. Dickens, whose works early rose into great, it may be said unexampled, celebrity. That they possess very high merits is obvious, from this circumstance : no one ever commands, even for a time, the suffrages of the multitude, without the possession, in some respects at least, of remarkable powers. Nor is it difficult to see what, in Mr. Dickens's case, these powers are. To extraordinary talent for the delineation of the manners and ideas of middle life, and a thorough acquaintance with them in all their stages below the highest, he unites a feeling and sensitive heart, a warm interest in social happiness and improvement, and most remarkable powers for the pathetic. To this must be added, that he is free from the principal defects of the writers who have preceded him in the same line, and which have now banished their works from our drawing-rooms. Though treating of the same subjects and grades in society, he has none of the indelicacy of our older novelists. We see in him the talent of Fielding, without his indecency ; the humour of Smollett, without his grossness. These brilliant qualities, joined to the novelty and extent of the field on which he entered, early secured for him a vast circulation and widespread reputation. It was founded on more than the merit, great as it was, of the author— selfish feelings in the readers combined with genius in the writer in working out his success The great and the affluent rejoiced in secret at beholding the manners of the middle class so graphically drawn. To them it was a new world ; it had the charm of foreign travelling. They said in their inmost hearts, "How different they are from us !'' The middle class were equally charmed with the portrait ; every one recognised in it the picture of his neighbour, none of himself —Alison's Europe.

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article12948077

"PICTURES OF THE FUTURE."

 How A Socialist Millenium Would Work.

Let us start by admitting that it is pretty hard to say how anything would "work." So long as the materials to be worked upon are the ever-changing thoughts and passions of mankind the best of us must be content to grope about more or less in the dark. Those who think on social questions at all are all disposed to believe that things might easily be better than they are. Some imagine that they could not possibly be worse. Be that as it may upon one point we are all agreed, and that is that there is room for improvement. Hence the zeal with which we pull to pieces one another's little schemes. Now everyone has a right to his own opinion about these things ; and the only man whose opinion is not worth having is the one who holds that conditions can never be bettered because just at present they are good enough for him. Carl Marx had a perfect right in his "working man's bible" to expose the evil of "profit-mongering ;" Gronlund conferred a boon on many of us by publishing a sort of new testament by which the hard economics of the "bible" were brought within the grasp of working men, and Bellamy certainly did a good day's work when he undertook to weave the sacred doctrines into a romance. Now one, Eugene Richter, described as "the most brilliant parliamentary leader in the German Reichsrath," has risen in his might to demolish all three ; and Mr. Stead in the current number of the Review of Reviews bestows upon his pamphlet, for it is as a pamphleteer that he has taken the arena, the distinction of commenting upon it as "The book of the month."

 * * * 

According to Mr. Stead Richter has delineated "what would almost of necessity be the incidents of an attempt prematurely to realise the collectivist ideal." I need hardly tell the readers of the Worker after what I have written on the subject that I am not myself a State Socialist. Whatever I write I write from the standpoint of an Individualist, which presumably is Mr. Richter's standpoint too. Still as an Individualist I should like before touching upon the subject matter of the book to ask Mr. Stead what earthly use it is at this time of day to publish even a pamphlet on the evils of prematurely realising the collectivist ideal, and offering that to the public as an antidote to Bellamy's " Looking Backward." Obviously the kind of Socialism sought by my socialistic friends is not the Socialism of a premature birth. They call themselves "evolutionary socialists." In other words they see the wisdom of "making haste slowly," and are ready to guide rather than to rush the forces of industry on towards their goal— the more ready indeed because they are firmly convinced that that is the goal towards which industrial life itself is tending. One might as reasonably look for a good night's rest after eating a dish of half cooked potatoes as expect much satisfaction from premature Socialism, or for that matter anything else that comes out of season. It surely doesn't call for a pamphlet to convince us of that. And to do Mr Richter justice it is evidently the genuine article that he has in his mind. Only Mr. Stead, who likes to stand well with all sorts of people— the very wicked ones alone excepted— seems in this respect to have been disposed to let his Socialist friends down gently at the expense of the author.

 * * * 

Now if Mr. Stead could have told us that the book was a sort of political extravaganza he might have set a good many readers hunting through its pages in vain for a glimmer of humour, but he would at least have prepared them for some of the extraordinary things the author has to say. "Looking Backward" is a dream if you like— the dream of a healthy and beautiful mind: "Pictures of the Future" is a wretched nightmare— one of those especially provoking nightmares in which the walls of your room refuse to stand at right angles to the floor, in which you invariably post the wrong letter to the wrong girl, in which you walk abroad in your purple and fine linen and all of a sudden find yourself "doing the block" in your night shirt. Mr. Richter has as much right to speculate upon the possibilities of State Socialism as anybody else, but his readers have also a right to demand that in an apparently serious work upon a really serious subject he should speak like a serious man, and he is certainly not doing this when he assumes that in a Socialistic state of society twentieth century Germany would manifest less common sense than a tribe of Australian blacks. His rulers are perfect donkeys. Bumble himself was not such an ass— and with the solitary exception of the man who is supposed to be telling the story, a master bookbinder and an ardent disciple or Marx and Bebel, his citizens are blessed with less intelligence than you would expect to find in the majority of nurseries.

 * * * 

The narrative begins appropriately enough with the reconstruction of society. The Socialists have secured a majority in the Reichsrath ; the bourgeois are leaving the the country by thousands ; the workers are celebrating their victory, and the new government is just getting into swing. Very good, but listen : The first thing they do is to pass a law making labour compulsory upon all persons between the ages of twenty-one and sixty-five. Up to the age of twenty-one young people are compelled to spend their time at school ; after sixty five to the end of their days old people are compelled to live in idleness. No one has a right to choose his own work, no one has a right to say where he will work. Thus a man who was in the old days an expert telegraphist may be employed in sweeping the streets of Berlin whilst his wife may be told off to run a soup kitchen at Cologne. And such a soup kitchen! Your food is weighed out in equal portions. The hungry labourer gets no more than the dyspeptic clerk. There are no menus because there is no choice of dishes; there are no waiters because that would be un-socialistic. The dietary scale, however, is based "on a scientific calculation of the quantities of albumen, fat and carbohydrates needful to maintain the human body in a healthy condition." The idea of a second helping is "mercilessly laughed down," and indeed a policeman stands by, watch in hand, ready to tap you on the shoulder when the regulation number of minutes has expired ; and you are then expected to make room for some other hungry Socialist who has been waiting patiently behind you. 

* * * 

As women are told off to work some provision must of course be made for their children and this is done by means of State nurseries in which the poor little things are "regulated" into a state of hopeless misery. Their friends are allowed to visit them rarely, and they are on no account permitted to bring them sweets or toys. Indeed the idea of a child having playthings "all to itself" is altogether opposed to the laws of the State, "as that would interfere with its training in the principles of social equality." No wonder the only child depicted in the book soon pines away and finally dies of croup. It is all of a piece with the general tenor of life under these extraordinary conditions, too, that the mother first hears of the illness of her darling, when after its death she calls to pay her usual fortnightly visit. "The great removal" involves another gigantic stretch of imagination. The houses in which the various families— or as many members of the family as are permitted to live at home— are to occupy is decided by lot. The hero of the story had hitherto been comfortably quartered in a decent house fronting the road. Much to the chagrin of his wife, however, the result of the lottery necessitates their removal to a couple of small rooms at the back. Their furniture, too, goes astray in a most unsatisfactory manner. Excepting a few chairs, a table and a couple of beds it is wanted for the new institution for children, old people and invalids. And thus they lose the big armchair that they had presented to the grandfather on his last birth day, the wardrobe they had bought after their wedding, and innumerable other things hallowed by the sacred recollections of family life ; and as one may imagine it was small compensation to know that in the aristocratic parts of the city "the furniture vans were standing in files," and that after all in their new apartments they would not have room for more than was left. Apart from the insanity of the whole proceeding one can only wonder what the cabinetmakers were doing all this time. 

* * *

 The theatres were managed no better. At first there was a mischievous degree of preference for variety performances, whilst classical plays intended for the glorification of Social Democracy were acted to empty benches. So after a while the government in its wisdom decided to arrange for individual pleasure seekers the particular place of amusement at which they were to spend their evenings, and to determine by lot the respective parts of the house they were to sit in— with the natural consequence that those who were deaf and short-sighted were often stowed away in remote corners at the back of the pit. In the workshops people not only objected to do an honest day's graft themselves, but they objected to others working hard. Bebel had promised them a "four hours' day," you see, and as the government could only see its way to reducing the number of hours to eight they felt it incumbent to work at no more than half their normal speed. Little wonder that zeal and energy were killed, that whilst discipline was lax tyranny prevailed on every hand, that the question of ways and means began to trouble the authorities, that everyone grew discontented, some seeking escape in emigration, others in suicide, and that the "Socialist Millenium" ended in open revolt, aggravated by a war with France.

 * * * 

These are but a few of the remarkable things that Mr. Richter expects to follow in the wake of collectivism. Can any one— would Mr. Herbert Spencer himself— say that his expectations were likely to be fulfilled ? Is it reasonable to suppose that a ministry of socialist would not do the best they could for Socialism. Why, by the absurdity of his own suppositions Mr. Richter does more for the party of State control than the characters he has here delineated. He is not even consistent. Thus, in one place he tells us that journeymen get things all their own way, loafing and slumming their work at pleasure, because they appoint their own overseers, and a little farther on he allows his hero to lament that the girls in the shops are afraid to complain of the undue familiarity of the male superintendents because complaints only made matters worse. "Such things may have happened formerly," the poor father reflects. "But in those cases escape was always possible by seeking employment elsewhere." This is just a little "too thin." The lady who did the book into English for the Review of Reviews steps from behind the curtain with the gentle rebuke—"not always under unlimited competition." On the other hand the journeymen who have their "bosses" so completely under their thumbs are represented as being quite unable to effect a change of ministry because being civil servants they are afraid of the pains and penalties attached to hostile criticism. Really what does this "brilliant parliamentary leader" mean?

 * * * 

As for his all round compulsory labour, his assumption that socialists would begin by deliberately trampling under foot the first principle of social fife— the family— his scheme of education, his State restaurants, his nurseries, his system of house occupation and the tyrannical management of his ideal theatres, could anything be more absurd? Is it even a moderately fair portrayal of what could possibly happen ? That things would not work smoothly under a system of general State proprietorship and control, that the prerogative of the Government would more or less come into conflict with the reasonable liberties of the individual, that production would be devoid of healthy stimulus, and that discontent and friction would be the inevitable result, I for one firmly believe. But there is moderation in all things and of course a limit to what some of us deem the evils of State control. Why, life under Nero was not more hopeless for the masses than Mr. Richter assumes that a government of Democratic Socialists would make it. Is that a fair supposition? For my part I say unhesitatingly that it is not. On the contrary, is there not much in the socialistic idea to warrant the belief that it would on the whole make the world brighter and better than it is ; and are many of us not justified in rejecting it only because we think we know of something better still— a something that would endow the individual with greater freedom than he has ever had before and which as a result of that would banish for ever the fear of want to those who were ready and willing to work? And that is the Nationalisation of the Land. E.B. 

 — The Brisbane Courier, commenting upon the book says, "Something of the kind is needed in Australia just now, and perhaps this may not be altogether too late." A well-known Social-Democrat of Brisbane thereupon writes to the WORKER thus: The Courier's sublime ignorance of the economic interpretation of history and the quicksand basis of modern industrialism is indeed amazing. She little dreams of the inevitability of socialistic development. She shrieks against the flow of the ocean and calls on the fools to sit on the shore Canute-like and defy the waves to wash their dirty feet, apparently forgetting that the mighty swell is caused by the capitalist upheavals, trade depressions and bank smashes, in which she herself plays her little part." Can the Courier really think that Richter is going to succeed where Bismarck failed, or that any man or body of men can retard by so much as a momentary pause, let alone reverse, the motion of the world's axis because its rotation is now making slick for Socialism. A feat of that kind might be very gratifying to those who riot on the unpaid labour of the wage workers, on cut-throatism in trade with its booms and depressions, trade wars to force shoddy goods on unoffending races, bank smashes and bankruptcies with their inevitable concomitant of low wages and overwork, want of employment, starvation, and prostitution. But then it isn't possible. Capital will concentrate and insist of itself in becoming public property. It can't help its destiny, which is nationalisation and municipalisation. And in the face of this it is "altogether too late" to talk of a pamphleteer stopping Socialism in Australia or anywhere else.

Worker (Brisbane, Qld.),  1893 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article70861317

THE SOCIALISTIC IDEA OF "PERSONAL FREEDOM."

 [FOR THE TOCSIN.]

" 'English principles' mean a primary regard to the interests of property." Thus wrote Emerson in his ' English Traits,' and the remark holds equally good to-day. To us in Australia, and more especially to us who would lay the foundations or an Australian national life that will equal, if not eclipse, all that has been so far great in nationality, this remark of Emerson's should be suggestive of "Australian principles." What should our primary concern be? The interests of property ? No, certainly not. "Australian principles'' should mean a primary regard, not for the State, not for anything that is merely a means towards an end, but the welfare of the individual, which consists in the development of every faculty to the finest degree. And this can only be done by the socialisation, or communalisation, of material commodities, on which the development of the individual as an individual does not depend.

 Havelock Ellis has remarked on the tremendous waste of energy which results from the preparation of a thousand breakfasts when one would suffice. It is not a breakfast that helps the individual to develop. A breakfast merely keeps him alive. There is a vast difference between livelihood and life. The existence of the majority of the people is spent in struggling with the problem of livelihood, the problem of bread and butter; and it is only a Goethe, one man in a thousand, who, having the inclination, also has the opportunity of trying to find the perfect way, that is, to live life as finely and beautifully as possible. Perhaps, everyone will not have the same overmastering desire to live a Goethe life, but everyone should have the opportunity. It is this that lies behind Socialism, this idea of giving everyone an equal opportunity to live a perfect life, and all the much-abused, but wholly misunderstood, "domination of the Labour Party"  is but a means towards this great end.

 What does capitalism do for the living of the perfect life ? It acquiesces in free, compulsory and secular education and free libraries, and that is the most culture it will allow "the masses." Apart from that, it considers "the masses'' should be satisfied with their lot, for which they allege a divine sanction, when in truth the religion they nominally profess teaches just the reverse. And does the capitalist himself use his money to live the perfect life? Not he ! He spends the thousands which he has become possessed of in keeping race horses and yachts and courtesans. He does nothing for art, unless sometimes it is a freak of fashion to lionise some writer, painter, or musician, and then it is usually some posing mediocrity. Meanwhile the poet or inventor perishes, or else wears out his life as a miserable wage-earner, while his head is bursting with his great idea. The life of the average moneyed man or woman is spent in deadening every faculty of beauty and truth, in pursuing a glittering, aimless life, full of frivolity, superficiality, and inanity. The capitalist does not live life himself, and, as William Morris at the conclusion of his "News from Nowhere" says, he won't let other people live their lives either. Both the wage-lord and the wage-serf are deprived of real life under the capitalistic system, which is governed by " English Principles," which, as Emerson says, "mean a primary regard for the interests of property."

 Let us ask, What shall, "Australian principles " mean? And we make answer, the welfare of the individual and the maximum of personal freedom for everybody. The capitalistic apologist would have us believe that capitalism makes for greater personal freedom. In fact, a leaflet lately issued by the Victorian Employers' Federation talks of "the great Anglo-Saxon principle of personal freedom" as the " right to be as free in his work as in his religion." Now, in the first place, there is no such thing as freedom. It is an example of what is called medievalism, or absolutism, in thought to talk of "freedom" as if it were a self-existing entity. Freedom is as subject to relativity as anything else we can think of. And not only does this freedom vary with circumstances, but the word means different things when applied, first to work, and then to religion. Under the present state of affairs, the so-called freedom in work is not freedom at all. Work is the name we give to the process of having to subject the whole of our existence to some task or other, congenial or distasteful, merely to get in return the necessaries to live. Maxim Ghorki somewhere asks Why do we work? To get the necessaries to live. And why do we live? To be able to work. What's the good of that ? we all ask. No good at all. It is not life to be thus eternally going round in a circle and never getting anywhere, Yet it is for this that the capitalist, in a burst of altruism, beautiful to behold, would preserve the " personal freedom " of the worker or wage-earner. This is the doctrine of political individualism, which the capitalist, or his apologist, confuses so artlessly with personal individuality, or the right of the individual to work out his own destiny as well as he may. What has happened here, the logician will tell you, is an ambiguous using of terms. In one place the word "freedom" is used to refer to material things, to the securing of the necessaries of life, and in another place it means the development of a person's individuality, his mind, heart and soul. The material and spiritual aspects of life have been confused by these capitalistic apostles of "personal freedom."

 To allow the capitalist to be "unhampered by Legislative interference" will no doubt make for "personal freedom,'' but when the worker has got that particular brand of "personal freedom" he will be so free that he won't be able to call his soul his own. Mark those words: "To call his soul his own." They mean something, and that something is the Socialistic idea of personal freedom, an idea superior to the capitalistic idea, because it is purged of materialism, and reflects with the light of a higher conception of life. And if "Australian principles '' become synonymous with such a purified idea of " personal freedom," Australia will have taken a great step — a sort of giant's stride — forward.             LERLI.

Tocsin (Melbourne, Vic. ) 1903 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article201770378

The Social Drift in Modern Life.

 LECTURE BY REV. CANON PIKE.

By modern life I mean, in these remarks, the life of the European Civilisation from about the middle of the latter half of the 18th century, down to the present ; and by the Social Drift, I mean the general tendency of  social life during that period and at present. I shall venture to circumscribe the subject a little further. In certain European countries the leading tendencies of progress are not being displayed in any degree that is likely to help us. They would enter into a discussion of this sort mainly as illustrations of deficiency, rather than as examples of the principles I hope to set before you; and they belong to an order of things, really outside the range of the progressive forces of modern life. The countries I mean are those debouching on the Mediterranean Sea, countries which, from being the centre and pivot of the world's activities for many centuries have gradually fallen into a subordinate place in men's affairs. It is to the races of north-western Europe and of North America, that the task has devolved of carrying on aggressively the advance work of human society; and in the Anglo-Saxon branch the forces operating have their freest play.

 The beginning of an epoch in the world's life is marked by the liberation into the active affairs of men of certain principles of pure thought. By way of illustrating this fact allow me to refer you to the greatest epoch in the world's history. The Christian era was ushered in by the spread of certain new principles of thought, and corresponding ideals of life. A new standard of conduct, based upon the idea of the infinite value of the human soul, and the proclamation of the brotherhood of man, backed by a sanction of extraordinary strength; these are the starting points of that unprecedented uplifting of mankind, and the secret of those unparalleled advantages enjoyed by the races now associated with the name of the Christian Religion. Similarly, after the great upheaval of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, known as the Reformation, there came to be liberated into the life of the active and energetic people of Northern Europe, philosophic principles, which being ultimately accepted by influential bodies of men exercised a profound determinative effect upon the life of the world. For the sake of convenience, and because their names stand out most prominently as giving identity to two opposite systems of pure thought, Emmanuel Kant and David Hume may be accepted as the directing minds of the new movements and forces. Of course it is impossible to compress the systems of these great thinkers into the space at our disposal just now; but a sufficiently clear idea of them may be gathered from a brief statement to enable us to recognise them as they display their influence in the social life of our time. David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, in his treatise on " Human Nature" conceives the contents of that nature to consist simply and solely of sensations which stand related to nothing but what is comprehended within the range of experiences. In other words, man is what the past of the individual and the race has made him, no more and no less. The impressions made by Nature upon the senses and the recollections of these impressions, these things added up are the full account of human life. His own words are: " We are nothing but the series of our impressions and ideas." We have no direct concern with the philosophical consequences of such a doctrine as this, except that we must try to understand its bearings upon the social movement to which it gave force. You will see, however, that it means that any human being living in the present with all his faculties and instincts, however mean or however magnificent, is what he is simply because his progenitors bequeathed to him the nervous system which he now possesses. The explanation of him is to be found in the past; he is an aggregation of survivals. What we call his morals, his ideas of right and wrong, are the result of calculation as to what is likely to prove useful his own interests, well-understood, and regarded in an enlightened way, are the standard of conduct. Whatever contributes to the advancing of these interests is right; whatever fails to do that, is wrong. Hume's words are: "Whatever produces satisfaction is virtue; everything which gives uneasiness in human actions is called vice." He throws these principles into the social centre by saying that in the case of that "injustice which is so far away from our own interests as to in no way affect us, it still displeases us because we consider it as prejudicial to human society ;" but that still leaves our own sensations, our interests, our pleasures or displeasures, " what we consider," as the final court of appeal in moral questions. It makes Pain and Pleasure the dictators of what we ought or ought not to do ; and it was quite logical for one of Hume's successors to say that " the talisman of arrogancy, indolence, and ignorance," "an authoritative impostor," was the word " ought," as understood to imply the rights of Conscience. Hume had to deal with human nature on its social side, with man as a gregarious animal, living in communities, organised into societies, states, and nations. Here again his theory of human nature applies. The community has no real existence, for it " is simply the sum of the interest of the several members who compose it." The individual members are by nature quite independent of each other, being connected together by a mere accidental juxtaposition; and they are therefore in nature driven to maintain their independence and rights at all costs. The interests of society are no more than the interests of its component members for the time being; and the ruling factor of social life is the rivalry of interests between those members. In other words economics is the essence of all life and progress.

 Emmanuel Kant stands out as the great exponent of a quite opposite theory of life, the influence of which is in many directions neutralising the effect of Hume's doctrines. He, also, began with an analysis of Human Nature. He distinguished in it a quality or conviction which belongs to an order of things far beyond the range of things seen or experienced, and therefore outside the limits of man's understanding. This quality or conviction is to be regarded as having truth for its basis, and also as being a vital factor in the determination of our conduct as regards the interests with which we are surrounded. This is the uplifting factor of human life. Man is constituted by something altogether outside mere experiences past or present, and is related to ends quite beyond his own interests. What Hume calls our impressions and the recollections of these impressions and which we know by the common name of experiences, are not Kant tells us, received upon the mind like writing on a blank tablet. The mind itself contributes to every impression it receives. There is something in the mind which meets this something falling into it. Our experiences are not merely the result of an inherited nervous system. They are created by the co-operation of the native contents of the mind, and the impressions which come to us. In the moral realm he finds that the mind contains a "categorical imperative," an absolute authority which bids us do or forbear. An unrestrained "Thou shalt," or "Thou shalt not," which knows no "if" or " but," speaks the thing that man is bound to do ; and every individual act is the expression of this universal principle of duty. So far does he carry this principle of the moral " must," that he says the mind informs us that it ought to be absolutely triumphant in us, we should yield it perfect obedience, and be perfectly virtuous. But, as in this life man never is, nor can be this, we must be immortal ; and so stand related to Infinity, which is God. The social bearings of these doctrines are manifold, but two outstanding points must be noticed. The exceeding great demand put upon man by his moral nature, that he shall become perfectly virtuous, can only be met under conditions of freedom. Any limitation put upon freedom is of the nature of a hindrance to the fulfilment of the great "Ought," the discharge of the infinite responsibility. Men must always be at full liberty to strive after and attain the highest virtue and the greatest happiness, virtue being the condition of which happiness is the crown. Freedom, therefore, is the constant factor of that Social State which flows out from the Kantian philosophy, in regard to its moral bearings. But Kant also conceives man as being related to the Infinite, which is God; and his relationship is the overmastering and dominating one. Society is constituted through it. It is no aggregation, or accidental correlation of individual interests which may war against each other and of which the strongest takes the palm. It is grounded upon a supreme responsibility to the Eternal. Our social relationships and duties are no shrewd calculations of personal interests; but solemn duties owed to one another and to the Infinite Personality. Kant founds his theory of Society upon three fundamental principles: Freedom, Immortality, and God.

 Quite another school of social teaching draws its vitality from these principles of warring interests. Germany is the home of this development, too; and the writings of Nietzsche fairly represent its trend. He draws sword on behalf of the upper classes, just as Marx leads the proletariat. The real masters, the caste designed by nature to rule, have, he says, been robbed of their rights by the sentimental philanthropy and religion to which they have submitted. To have allowed themselves to surrender power into the hands of their inferiors, and to have trifled with the notion of a pretended equality is in the last degree absurd. He would have the ruling classes renounce the Christian religion, and to emancipate themselves from its narcotic morality. It has enabled the serf to enlist sympathy, to obtain votes, to gain the upper hand. All the talk about Christian sympathy and brotherly love has resulted in the mawkish, contemptible consideration of a superior for his natural inferiors. The State is fast becoming a specious arrangement by which the best men are kept out of their own. Let us have no more of it. " A new commandment I give an to you; Become hard, my brethren.'' Put away parleying about the rights of man, which are the empty phrases of an effete religion. " We are in possession, we are the strong ; the best belongs to me and mine, and if men give us nothing, then we take them; the best food, the purest sky, the strongest though the fairest women." Evidently Hume's and Mill's postulates and axioms can be made to do service in more directions than one. Both the Marxean Socialism and this recent Nietzschian individualism proceed from identical premisses, which account for man as a series of impressions and ideas, for society as an arrangement by which the unrestrained pursuit of enlightened self-interest is to bring about harmony between the interests of the individual and those of the State. This war of interests with all it has involved, good and bad, is a characteristic of the social drift in modern life.

 Another and apparently opposing force has been at work collaterally and co-incidently. At scarcely any moment have the principles of Utilitarianism been permitted their full logical embodiment in practice. There is a class of facts for which unrestrained competition makes no provision, and which is left out of reckoning by the doctrine that the State should restrict its intervention in matters of business to the narrowest limits. Unrestricted private enterprise was itself the cause of a great mass of the suffering which Mill thought was so unpleasant to behold. It has been found that business will always adjust itself to the level of those qualities which contribute most directly to success under the conditions of unregulated competition. A suppositional case will illustrate my meaning. Ten men compete in tne market for the supply of cotton. Nine of them have a profound regard for those moral considerations which forbid such things as the employment of child labor, the overworking of employees, and the giving of a wage below the living standard. But the tenth man has no moral sense. He looks after nothing but large sales, good profits, and a broad market. What is the result? He comes into free competition with the others, and as buyers only trouble about qualify and prices, the nine can choose between losing the market, and adopting the immoral man's methods. Since the accepted utilitarian standard of conduct demands no consideration for any interests but one's own, there is nothing in the nature of free competition to forbid them. And thus business tends to be dragged down to the lowest level. I need not tell you that this is no imaginary thing, nor need I dilate upon the terrible social evils to which it gave rise. The growth of those evils to proportions calculated to alarm the most phlegmatic, marked the utter failure of the teachings of the school of Mill to bring about that fixed and unchanging state of things in which there would be an equilibrium between the interests of the individual and of the State, an equilibrium of perfected happiness for all. As wealth increased men continued to decay.

 Very early in the century the principle of non-intervention was violated in obedience to another imperative demand. In the year 1802 the State forbad the employment of apprenticed pauper children for more than twelve hours a day. Nothing was said about an age limit for child workers, nor in fact was anything done for any but those of the pauper class. It took nearly twenty years for the State to muster up courage enough to forbid the employment of children under nine years of age, and to fix a twelve hours' day for all workers under sixteen years of age. In the thirties, the Manchester capitalists vigorously and successfully protested against State intervention in the direction of regulating the conditions of free adult labour. But from that time down to the present a long list of measures have marked the State's sense of its right to interfere in the relations between labour and capital. That is not the only important change that has taken place. Perhaps the most striking result of the development of the principle of voluntary association for social ends which was so strongly advocated by John Stuart Mill, has been the growth of trades-unionism. These organisations are in theory voluntary associations; and they have brought to bear upon the competitive spirit of the time the whole force of the combined will of the working classes. Following out the utilitarian rule, they have pursued the interests of the labourer in competition and struggle against the interests of the employer, with a view to raising the standards of living. For a great many years this principle was followed, with the result that frequent strikes, lock-outs, and other attendant circumstances, indicated the war of interests that always raged in the existing social order. Within the past few years the trades-unions have ceased to confine their attention to the voluntary method. They have largely adopted the principle of State intervention for this purpose of procuring their ends, and have consequently entered the arena of politics with a view to capturing the forces of the State to enable them to better their conditions. In that transition they have crossed the boundary line that separates free competition from State interference.

 Two other forms of the application of the principle of unrestricted private enterprise need to be noticed before we have in view the gigantic forces with which the principle opposed to the Utilitarian doctrine has to grapple. Acting on the lines of voluntary association these have been formed, in several great commercial countries, but especially in the United States, great combinations of capital for the purpose of controlling the whole of some particular industrial and commercial activity; and so to form a virtual monopoly. The first of these was the Standard Oil Trust, organised in 1882; and since then most of the great industries of the world have been drawn more or less into the vortex. The aim of these combines is to prevent the waste of competition, to control markets to become possessed of the world's living resources for the benefit of the wealthier classes. It is a voluntary association in the interests of a class, unconsciously obeying the new commandment of Nietzsche. The owners of the millions of capital involved are in the business solely for the purpose of making all the money they can. I need not say to what extent such combinations may become able to direct the forces of the State. It is significant that hitherto all the efforts made in the United States to check their growth have failed ; and we have the result of monopolies existing for the exploiting of the people, in defiance of cities and states. One writer, an experienced United States politician, says: "I see enough every day to satisfy me that the petitions, prayers, protestations, and profanity of sixty millions of people are not as strong to control legislative action as the influence and effort of the head of a single combine with fifty million dollars at his back."

 That the drift of things indicated by the existence of these great associations is not calculated to end in the amelioration of the conditions against which the social legislation of England has been directed, will become more apparent when we remember that the competitive agencies of trade and commerce are rapidly overleaping international boundaries. The Lancashire cotton spinner is competing in the world's market with the cheap labour of India. Japan is rapidly being brought into the arena, and is entering the lists in China, against the world's industries. What the international aspect of this question implies may be faintly seen in the light of one small matter. The coaling of a Japanese trading steamship in its home ports is done by young girls. A fringe of rising platforms four or five in number surrounds the ship, the lowest being just above the level of the sampan which brings the coal alongside. On the platforms stand girls, in lines of steps above. The coal is filled into baskets, and these are passed from girl to girl until they reach their destination. The work is done with such rapidity and skill that between ten in the morning and four in the afternoon a thousand tons of coal will pass from the sampans to the ship. There you have the international aspects of free competition in a nutshell; and a fair basis for the settlement of such questions as Freetrade, Preferentialism, White Australia, and many other social problems.

 I spoke just now, of the beginnings of those violations of the principle of non-intervention by the State which have gone so far to better the conditions, and raise the standards, of life in Europe. The mere narration of its history is not a matter that need engage our attention. We are more concerned with the forces and causes that lay behind it. It has brought about a condition of things of which hardly any one in these days openly disapproves. No matter which way a man's personal interests might lie he is ready enough when speaking in the hearing of his fellow men, to agree that the movement that has brought women out of coal mines, has prohibited infant labour, has regulated the working day so as to bring it within reasonable limits, has made sweating offensive to every respectable citizen, and the sweater an object of contempt amongst men, not to mention a multitude of other changes of the same kind, has proved a priceless benefit to society. It is a movement which is still in progress, and which will be the more effectively directed the better it is understood.

 For the principles which have underlain the forces of the movement we must look to the doctrines of Emmanuel Kant, and the general teachings of the Christian religion. Kant's conception of man as a being standing related, not merely to his own past, a series of impressions and ideas, but to infinite and eternal things, sheds upon him a dignity, and opens to him the vision of a destiny, quite beyond the range of mere personal interests. The haunting sense of responsibility to these infinite and eternal things has been a great fund of social force for man's uplifting. Gleamings of immortality have visited the minds of men, and have brought the significance of this infinite relationship within the bounds of immediate duties to be done. These natural contents of the human mind have been ratified and endorsed by those teachings of Christianity which have brought men's spirits into communication with the Eternal God. And the consequence has been that wherever that religion has been really understood and applied, it has deepened the sense of responsibility, stimulated the desire for freedom, softened and developed the sympathies, and created a rich reserve of social energy.

 It has been popularly imagined that no concession has ever been made by the ruling classes to those beneath them until it has been wrung from them by fear. I say nothing of the reluctance with which they have sometimes surrendered their prescriptive privileges; but, had their determination to hold them been as brutal as is sometimes represented, it must be remembered that they could have remained fortified and invincible to this day. The passing of the Reform Bill of 1833 may be cited as an almost classical Instance of this confusion. The Bill was opposed by the Lords until the London mob demonstrated its seriousness by pulling down Hyde Park railings; and it is argued that the surrender of the Upper House showed their fear of their own lives. Now the ruling classes of that time were the masters of all the material forces in England, and could command them at will. Two thousand years ago the uprising of a mob would have been suppressed at all costs by the use of these material forces, and it would have been found that the classes identified with the rebels, instead of having their burdens lightened or their freedom widened, would have felt an extra turn of the screw which held them down. What made the difference ? The position in 1833 confronting the rulers of England was either to surrender the demand for Reform, or call out the military forces. The latter course involved consequences from which every man shrank in horror. The softening of character, the sense of responsibility to a higher Power, had undermined the power of selfishness, so that when the grim alternative came to be faced, the opposition to the people's wishes melted away. The party in power was rendered incapable of wielding its strength in its own interests by its own repugnance to suffering, misery, wrong, and degradation. The history of the social legislation of our times, which is recognised as progressive, is " simply a history of concessions demanded and obtained by that party which is through its position inherently the weaker from the party which as the holder of power is unmistakably stronger. There is no break in the series; no exception to the rule."

 I am sure you will immediately recognise the entire compatibility between the doctrines I have associated with the name of Kant and the movements of social reform in the past; and you will find it impossible to reconcile those movements with the teachings of the other school. In fact, so violently are the Utilitarian principles opposed to the forces of the movement, that even such men as Cobden and Bright, the leaders of the Manchester school in politics, rigorously and uncompromisingly resisted the factory legislation of the forties. The very apostles of Free trade bitterly opposed the amelioration of the conditions of labour; and for the same reasons as they advocated the opening of the ports. Free corn meant cheap labor; and graphic pictures of starving people touched the heart of England. But, the Factory Acts increased the cost of manufacture, and thus came to be strenuously opposed. The same voice which pleaded for the hungry multitude that it might be fed, cried out that the same well-fed multitude should be worked sixteen hours a day, should be put into the factories at nine years of age, and should be paid for its labor any price it could manage to get. But anything is grist that comes to the Utilitarian mill! There were other voices, however, which appealed to the heart of England, aroused her conscience, and stirred her to undertake the responsibility of lifting from the worker all but the necessary burdens of life. Not from any one section of the people did the response come to the needs of the time. Most of the leaders of the Radical Party in England have been members of the ruling class, men of gentle birth and breeding. Frederick Denison Maurice, Charles Kingsley, Thomas Arnold, Arnold Toynbee, the Earl of Shaftesbury, these men, foremost in the battle for reform, belonged to the educated and privileged classes. The lines of social and political cleavage have struck right through the strata of English society, leaving people of all ranks on either side. These men have been moved by no narrow ideal of enlightened selfishness, nor attracted by any pursuit of personal advantage. In all their writings, speeches, and acts there throbs the pulse of a strenuous devotion to duty, the warm glow of enlightened sympathy goes out towards their less fortunate fellow creatures, the spirit of noble sacrifice grows out of the sense of their responsibility to the Infinite God; and in their minds there always burned the inspiration of a confident hope that what they did might hasten the coming of the Kingdom of God. Little by little they have struck away the fetters that bound the people. Inch by inch they have widened the areas of freedom. Slowly, and persistently have they striven to endowment and equip the masses of their fellow men with those qualities which will enable them to maintain their freedom, and hold fast the liberty wherewith they have been made free.

 So much for the drift in modern society down to the present. The sketch has been slight, but enough to show the set of the current. You will not expect me to play the part of the prophet. But one or two things are sure. Having set in motion social forces, man loses control of them at once. They are under a law quite independent of human volition. Man becomes their servant, not their master. Thus, the tendencies already existing will continue. The concentric theories of Hume, Bentham, the Mills, and Herbert Spencer stand for permanent facts in life. I do not believe in their philosophies, which are one-sided, narrow, and materialistic. But the gigantic and intense struggle which has been identified with the principle of free competition in trade, but which may go on independently of that principle, is an indispensable factor in human progress. All other things being equal the most strenuous people, classes, races, will rise, while these who display lesser energy will fall in the descending order of their declining effort. If competition is a necessary spur to strenuousness, then without doubt the dominant future lies with the keenest competitors. One thing that emerges from the study of history is that progress is only possible amongst those people who are for ever attempting what lies just beyond their reach ; the attempt strengthens their vitalities, their success spurs them on to higher things. We may devise schemes which will appear to do away with the necessity for the struggle for existence; we may even succeed in so far lessening the necessity for that struggle as to obtain for ourselves comparative ease, and the achievements of the desired ends of life without travail and stress. But no deadlier blow could be struck at our stability than that. The doom of that race is sealed which refuses, for whatever reason, to continually and unremittingly put out the sum total of all its greatest capacities for the accomplishment of some task lying beyond its immediate realizations.

 That is only another way of saying that the meaning and goal of human life lie far beyond itself. During the Christian era there has been liberated into society a vast fund of force which is represented by the word "Duty." The " Ought;" the sanction, of this transcends the material and passing interests of mankind. The strident railing of Bentham, and all the protestations of the Mills, have vainly spent themselves against it. It still remains the supreme incentive to energy. As the years pass by it becomes more closely allied with sympathy, benevolence, and philanthropy. The sternness of the sense of duty is tempered by compassion and softened by the humane feelings. The drift in this direction is unmistakable, and its continuance is assured. A great philosopher has recently said that " truth is the net resultant of contending forces." One is hardly ready to accept such a definition without first submitting it to a searching investigation. As an indication of the probable lines of progress, or the social drift in the immediate future, it is probably not far wide of the mark. The war of contending interests is nowadays very much a thing of class and will probably become more so for a generation or so. The parties tend to sharper divisions, to more definite schemes of crystallization upon extreme principles. But, neither side will get its own way. 'When the critical battles of the campaign are fought, it is likely that the neutralising effect of the struggle will be seen, and the disintegrated forces gathered up in the sweep of those higher movements of feeling, of sympathy, of philanthropy, of justice, and of righteousness, which are becoming more and more the determinative factors of social life. Though every man and every class and community will be compelled to strenuous life, the conditions of the struggle will be such that the door of opportunity will never be barred against any, while every amelioration of needless hardship will bring into the conflict a zest and incentive that will make it a joy. The old world is young yet, and it is writing off the sins of its past. Its eye is bright with hope, beaming with tenderness, clear in the sense of complete reliance upon the Infinite and Eternal God.

Burrangong Argus (NSW : 1904) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article247711006

The Troubles of Turkey

 LITTLE as we may understand of the Salonica affair, it is not difficult to see some things in it which lie at the root of most of the troubles of Turkey. For one thing, the quarrel at the Gulf of Salonica was a religious quarrel between Christians and Mahomedans ; for another it was a religious quarrel which reached its serious stage principally through the inability of the authorities to quell the fury of a fanatical mob. And, in addition to these, there is the restraint that is put upon Turkish license and upon Mahommedan fury by the menace of foreign Powers. These are the things which have contributed most to make the Eastern Question as we have it to-day.

Let us take these things, in the order in which we have stated them. The riot at Salonica was a religious riot, and the rebellion in the Herzegovina is a rebellion that has religion at the root of it. It is not only a rebellion of Christians against Mohammedans, but it is a struggle that has arisen out of the religious prejudices which separate the Christians and the Mohammedans so widely from each other. It is a mistake to suppose that the Hersegovinian quarrel is principally a quarrel of races, or that it is simply a rebellion against an alien rule. Strange as it may appear, it is not against the rule of the SULTAN chiefly that the insurgent provinces of Turkey are protecting, and it is worthy of remark that most of those who are fighting against each other in the Hersegovina are of the same race. The contending parties are one, so far as blood and nationality are concerned. The divisions from which their quarrels have arisen have grown out of the fact that while the populace in the insurgent provinces have adhered to the immemorial traditions of Christianity, a section of the people at the time of the Turkish Conquest, adopted, and have continued to adhere to, the Turkish faith.

Faiths, as we all know, can be the savagest of things on convenient occasions, but the Mohammedan faith is essentially and confessedly an implacable one. The battles of the Crescent have often been fought and won by the aid of the scimitar. The religion of the Turks is, in some of its phases, at least, both a religion of hatred and a religion of conquest. There are Mohammedans who not only refuse to eat with a Christian dog, but who would, if it were in their power, decline to fight with him even, lest if they should fight on the same battle field their ashes should be polluted by contact with those of an infidel.

In the Herzegovina this flame of religious detestation is fed by the strength of a social ascendancy. The Christians in these parts of the SULTAN'S Empire are the populace, while the Mohammedans form an oligarchical tyranny. The cruelty of such a tyranny may well be imagined, but the facts of it are even beyond what an ordinary imagination would be able to picture. In the Turkish Empire, an it exists at present, the Christian is not and never can be a citizen. He has no rights, no country, and no home. The essential principle of Turkish rule, it has been truly said, is the government of unarmed Christian communities by armed Mohammedans. The Christian is the victim of a diabolical system of forced labour, which in the hands of his Mohammedan masters renders him liable to be compelled at any time to leave his farm and his home to drudge for his enemies. Notwithstanding this, the unfortunate Rayah is held responsible in good seasons and in bad ones, not only to pay the most cruel of taxes, whether he has the means of doing it or not, but is bound on the spot to pay for those of others who may come short, and in default is summarily bound to a post and beaten until he finds some means of appeasing the cupidity of his masters. Outrageous as the thought of such brutality as this may be to us, it is in the eyes of a Turk of the good old times too good a lot for Christian dogs. Things of this sort have been going on in the Turkish provinces for years and decades, and the world has not been aware of them or has given them no heed. The progress of events has, however, carried daylight into the extremities of the Ottoman Empire, and the long persecuted Rayahs of Bosnia and Hersegovina have risen not only to protest against the tyrannies and the butcheries of their Mohammedan tyrants, but to demand as a reality what has been so long and so vainly given them as a promise, namely, that the social and civil rights of Christians shall be equal with those of Mussulmans themselves. The war which is being fought out within the Empire of Turkey is therefore but an outstanding phase of the great contest for religious equality which, in one form or another, is the standing warfare of this generation.

But we were also told that the riot of Salonica arose out of the inability of the Turkish authorities to quell the rage of the Mohammedan populace. This inability is the next cause of all the Turkish quarrels in existence The Christians of Herzegovina, in asking for social rights and religious equality, are asking for what the Government of the SULTAN has not the capacity to give them. These things were promised most explicitly by the treaty of 1856, and the promise has been repeated at one time and another from that day to this. But the things have not been granted, and are not likely to be. The reason of this does not lie altogether in the insincerity of the SULTAN or in the corruption of his officials. The insincerity and the corruption may be true enough, but if the SULTAN were perfectly sincere, and his Government a model of honesty, the result would in all probability be exactly the same. The Turkish Government has no power over the Mohammedan fanatics who have driven the mild-mannered Rayahs to desperation. And if the facts were otherwise, it the SULTAN were really able to grant that protection to the Christians which he has so often promised, he could only do so by alienating and enraging the governing classes in the insurgent provinces. In attempting to initiate reforms the Turkish authorities have already come into serious collision with their Mohammedan fanatics. The reason is simple enough. The granting of civil rights to Christians would mean their ceasing to be the tools of Mussulman authority, and the victims of Mussulman cruelty ; and for this the local Mohammedan authorities are in no way prepared. The enemies of the Christians in the districts where insurrection prevails are the governing classes. They are the landlords and the judges, who demand that their rights shall not be infringed, and that that their enemies shall not be conciliated. In making this demand they have hitherto prevailed, and are likely to prevail in future, unless some power stronger than the one which exists at Constantinople interferes. In reference to Hezegovina as to Salonica the Turkish authorities are intrenched behind a non possimus.

But the third difficulty in Turkey arises out of the fact that the day has come in which the Turks cannot kill a consul or two without getting a score of ironclads at their doors. In other words, the fact that Turkey is propped up by foreign Powers compels her to bear, without a protest, the humiliation of submitting to be told by other people what she must do and how far she must go. These are conditions which Turkey is obliged to accept, but to which she cannot adjust herself. Turkey is essentially a military State, and it belongs to a military State to dispose of rebels by soldiers and not by diplomatic arguments. But since Turkey now exists by foreign guarantees this is just what she cannot do. In the good old times it might have been possible for the Turk's to have made short work of the Herzegovinian rebellion. One or two hundred thousand drilled murderers might have been marched at once into the unruly districts, in which case the rebels might soon have been brought to their senses or been swept out of existence altogether. But as it is, when Turkey takes a step she is liable to be called to order by the six great Powers of Europe, and the result of this is that, since she has ceased to have the power of doing things in her own way, she has apparently ceased to have the power of doing anything at all. The three causes we have named lie at the root therefore of much of the troubles of Turkey. The Eastern question is, however, a large one, and we shall take an early opportunity of returning to it.

The Sydney Morning Herald 1876  http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article13375664

TURKEY AND HER PROTECTORS.

 (FROM OUR CONTINENTAL CORRESPONDENT.)

KADI-KENI (TURKEY), AUG. 25.

For this once I address my letter to you from a Turkish town, on the Asiatic coast of the Bosphorus, some three or four miles from Constantinople, Kadi-keni is the ancient Chalcedon, so famous by the council held there in the fifth century, by which the doctrine of Arius was condemned. The prospect I have before my eyes is most admirable ; to my left the entrance of the sea of Marmora, the Point of the Seraglio, and the Golden Horn, an incomparable harbour, which would contain without crowding the united fleets of the whole world. Right before me are the two European suburbs of Galata and Pera, the stir and bustle of which form a striking contrast with the calm and stillness of the Turkish city, situated on the other side of the Golden Horn ; to my right the Bosphorus, stretching out for nearly twenty miles as far as the Black Sea, its shores studded with villas, the summer residence of the European ambassadors, the high dignitaries of Turkey, and the wealthy Greek and Armenian merchants.

It is three p.m. From the roof of the adjacent minaret, the shrill voice of the Muezzin is calling, for the fourth time since sunrise, the faithful to their prayers, casting to the four quarters of the heavens the sacred words which constitute the whole Mussulman creed, Allah il Allah ! wè Mohammed reçout Allah ! (God is God, and Mahomet is the prophet of God !) Some hundred people, men and women, are slowly bending their steps towards the mosque, which they must not enter before they have purified themselves according to the rite prescribed, at one of the many fountains with which the approaches of the sacred edifice are lined for that purpose. An old grey-bearded effendi, who a moment ago was placidly smoking his tchibouk before his door, piously recites his namaz or prayer, after having carefully laid the corner of his carpet towards Mecca. The passers-by go and come in the street ; some Greek sailors, seated in a coffee-house, a few yards off, are bawling and gesticulating ; the fervent disciple of Mahomet nor hears nor sees them— wholly taken up by his pious occupation.

It is barely two weeks since I left France. Thanks to railroads and steamboats, Constantinople is now only four days and a-half distant from Paris, and five days from London. You take the railway on Wednesday, at seven in the forenoon, at the Victoria or Ludgate-hill station, and the following Monday, at twelve o'clock, the steamer lands you at Constantinople, during which short interval you have passed through France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria. Less than half a century ago, you required six whole weeks to make the same journey, and if you chose the route by sea, you ran great risk of falling into the hands of the pirates of Barbary, by whom the Mediterranean was at that time infested.

It would doubtless ill become me, at this distance from Paris, and not having opened a single newspaper for the last fortnight, to speak to you of what usually forms the subject matter of our monthly correspondence ; and, therefore, I shall not this time talk politics to you—European politics, I mean—nor shall I busy myself with giving you news concerning the fine arts, letters, theatres, or fashions. In return, I can give you a few interesting details about these far-distant countries, where are being agitated many serious questions so closely related to the general interests of Europe, that they become every day of more weight and moment. If your readers will kindly remember that we are here in the heart of the Eastern question—that nightmare of European statesmen—they will, I trust, forgive my having for this once departed from our wonted subjects, and transported them from the banks of the Seine to the shores of the Bosphorus.

I have several times made a long stay in Turkey, and have seen and examined its varied population—Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Serbs, and Bulgarians. I have been personally acquainted with the greater part of those personages who, during the last twenty years, have played a considerable part in these Eastern affairs. Men and things, I find them again to-day in nearly the same situation as formerly. Constantinople has, indeed, become a little more Europeanised ; turbans have grown scarcer, and the fez (thus is called the unsightly red bonnet introduced by the reform, which has taken the place of the Cashmere shawl which the Mussulmans of olden times were wont to wrap round their heads) is more frequently met with. The short, close-fitting surtout, buttoned from the waist to the chin, has almost everywhere driven away the ample wide-flowing garb which gave to the Turk of the old school so much grace and dignity. The Turkish women walk about the streets unattended. The white muslin kerchief with which they used to cover the head and face, so as to allow nothing to be seen but their eyes, has grown gradually smaller, so as to discover to the gaze nearly the whole of the countenance. The streets of Pera are lit up with gas. Some few bits of railways have been constructed from Routschouk to Varna, from Smyrna to Aïddin. Such are the only changes worthy of note which would seem to have taken place since my last visit to Constantinople in 1852 ; and yet there have come to pass since that period things of great pith and moment. The Crimean war, for instance, and the accession of a new Sultan, from whom very great things were expected.

Old Turkey is no more. The Turks themselves acknowledge this. The true Mussulmans, they say, are underground. As to Young Turkey, it has produced nothing. Wherefore, would be too long to tell. I state the fact without going into the reasons thereof. There has been much ill said of the Turks, and much more of the Koran, which has ever been presented as being a thorough bar to social progress and improvement. It is not so. The Koran is no more a bar to civilisation than the Gospel is, and it may be made a most powerful auxiliary. The only question is to interpret it rightly. One day, during the Egyptian campaign, the general-in-chief was conversing in his tent with several Arab cheiks or chiefs of tribes. One of these maintained that there could exist nothing which was not explained in the Koran. " Ah !" said Bonaparte, laughing ; "does it teach you how to make powder and shot?" "Yes, it does," gravely replied the cheik ; " but you must know how to read it." Unfortunately, for many a long year past, nobody has been found who does know how to read it, and, despite the reform undertaken by Sultan Mahmoud, ushered in by the massacre of the Janissaries, and followed up, as well as they were able, by his two sons, Abdul Medjid and the reigning sultan Abdul Aziz, that is how Turkey has been brought by degrees to the critical situation in which it is at the present time.

The worst part of the business is, that the Turks themselves seem to share the conviction that all is over with them, and that any attempt to raise the empire to a part of its former splendour will necessarily fail. A dervish, questioned one day as to the probable issue of the reform, made this reply—" When the plants revealed to the wise Sokman their medicinal virtues, none of them said I have the power to give life to a dead body. Sultan Abdul Medjid is a second Sokman, but Turkey, alas ! is a dead body." Meanwhile, the old Mussulmans cause themselves to be buried on the other side of the Bosphorus, in the vast burial-ground of Scutari, whose lofty cypresses I can just catch a glimpse of through my window, in order that when the Giaour shall have taken possession of European Turkey, their remains may still repose in peace on Asiatic ground—that cradle of their race.

What greatly conduces to and keeps up amongst the Turks this despondency, which is the primary cause of their powerlessness, is the sight of the undeniable and ever increasing progress already realised before their eyes by their Raïas, whilst they them-selves remain stationary.

Raïa is an Arab word, which signifies herd or flock. When the Turks inaugurated, by the capture of Constantinople, the succession of conquests, the rapidity of which was such that all Europe seemed on the eve of becoming the pray of the Mussulmans, they left to the conquered nations the free exercise of their religion, their laws, and civil government, but at the same time they reduced them to a state of absolute political inferiority. Thenceforward there existed in the empire two classes of subjects, placed in very unequal conditions with regard to each other. On the one hand, the Mussulman, affecting the tone and learning of a master ; on the other, the Raïa (id est, the non-Mussulman Christian or Jew), devoted, on account of his very faith, to all the wretchedness of slavery, and yet free to follow the precepts of that faith, and even enjoying a sort of civil self government under the jurisdiction of the chief of his commonalty.

Loud have been the outcries against the fanaticism of the Turks ; their tolerance in religious matters would be rather worthy of commendation, had that tolerance taken its rise in a feeling of respect for the liberty of conscience, and not in a narrow-minded exclusivism, which caused them to comprise in the same disdainful indifference all other religions than their own. Two priests, one Latin and the other Greek, were one day engaged in a debate as to the pre-eminence of their respective creeds, and as very naturally they could come to no decisive conclusion, they referred the matter to an imaum or Turkish priest, who had sat silently by during the whole of the discussion, "Of what avail is all this squabbling," replied the disciple of the Prophet, "and what matters it whether a pig be black or white, since it is none the less a pig ?" And such is the secret of Turkish tolerance.

Years and ages glided by one after another ; the number of Raïas visibly increased, whereas that of the Turks, ever at war with the powers of Christendom, and bearing the whole weight of the military service—the Raïas being looked upon as unworthy to bear arms—greatly decreased. At the present time European Turkey comprises 15,000,000 inhabitants, 4,000,000 only of which are Mussulmans ; the remainder are almost all Christians. But these latter are not only more numerous, they have also made a far greater advance in the arts of civilisation ; they are more active and industrious, have a better genius for trade ; their schools are superior to those of the Turks, and they are more anxious to learn.

Sultan Mahmoud, struck with this most uncomfortable state of things, sought to end it by bringing about a mingling of the two races, in the same way as the Gauls and Romans had mingled and become one after the conquest of Gaul, and the Anglo-Saxons and Normans after the invasion of England by William the Conqueror. He resolved to obliterate—at least before the civil law—all inequalities whatsoever between the various subjects of the empire, and to him is ascribed the admirable saying:—"Henceforward the Mussulman must be distinguished by the mosque alone, the Christian by the church, and the Jew by the synagogue." But the famous regulations which go by the name of the hati-charif of Gulhané, 1839—of the hati humaïoun of February, 1856, have remained a dead letter ; for of what avail are laws against custom? Doubtless the condition of the Christians was bettered, but they were never placed on a par with Mussulmans ; and to this very day their evidence is not admitted before the courts, despite the frequent orders issued to that effect by the Sublime Porte.

Nor can the Porte, in good sooth, sincerely wish for such a parity ; for if it consisted in fact—if the Christians were really placed on an equal footing with the Turks, having a right to fill the same posts and become ministers, generals, governors of provinces, being the most numerous, and at the same time the most intelligent—they would soon oust the Osmanlis, and all political power would pass away from the Turks into the hands of their former subjects.

Reduced to these terms, the debate between Turkey and her Christian subjects would be merely a national affair for herself, and have but very slight influence on the general polity of Europe. But foreign powers in their turn take a share in the debate, and thus give rise to the Eastern question (la question d'Orient.).

This intervention takes its date some hundred years since, though its origin may be traced back much further. When Francis the First, before all other Christian monarchs, entered into political relations with Turkey, then at the height of her power, Sultan Soliman of his own free will gave over to him the right of protecting the monks and Catholics of the Holy Land. In 1774, Russia, after a successful war against the Turks, compelled the then Sultan to acknowledge her right of intervention in behalf of her co-believers in the orthodox faith; and as the population of Turkey consists almost wholly of Mussulmans, or followers of orthodoxy, it naturally came about that the Sultan was no longer sole master in his own dominion, but must needs submit to the interference of a foreign power in his debates with his subjects. This dependency had been growing greater and greater when the events of these latter years induced France and England, together with Italy (which at that time meant only the kingdom of Sardinia), to enter upon a war with Russia in behalf of Turkey. The Treaty of Paris of 1856, in the framing of which the representatives of six great powers united their efforts, whilst it recognised once again the maintenance of the integrity of the Ottoman empire as necessary to the interests of Europe, yet stipulated in behalf of the Christian subjects of the Porte for certain immunities placed under the collective guarantee of the combined powers ; thus affording to those same powers the means and right of interference, so to say, at every moment, in the interior affairs of Turkey.

Fortunately for Turkey the powers are not always of one mind as to the mode of practising this intervention, and each of them in the settlement of these Eastern matters is guided by different views, arising from its own peculiar situation in Europe, and this clash of opinions creates a spirit of antagonism, which Turkey knows ever how to turn to her own advantage. Setting aside Italy, too recently raised to the rank of a great power, and placed herself in too precarious a situation to exercise any preponderating influence over the affairs of the Continent, and Prussia, who has no direct interest, and consequently no fixed policy in the East, there still remain the four great Powers—Russia, England, France, and Austria.

Russia, whose greedy eyes ever since the time of Peter the Great have been still and ever fixed upon Constantinople, is constantly in search of whatever may trouble Turkey, exciting underhand the Christian populations, whose cause she is for ever pleading, clamorously exaggerating the evils they suffer from ; and whilst she herself most pitilessly grinds down the unfortunate Poles, who would fain throw off the Muscovite yoke, in Turkey she urges on the Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, &c, to revolt against the Sultan. A portion of the orthodox clergy, the very consuls of Russia, besides a host of anonymous agents spread all over the Turkish provinces, are the instruments of this propagandism, invariably tending to the same end, by means and expedients of infinite variety. There is in the East a saying which conveys a good idea of this many-coloured, many-sided political craft, "The wolf changes his skin but not his nature."

The great antagonist of Russia in the East is England, as persistently attached to the principle that the Ottoman empire must be maintained as when Lord Chatham pronounced in the Upper House his famous phrase, " I refuse all discussion with whoever does not admit with me that the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire is of vital interest to England." The Foreign Office has undoubtedly no longer any illusion as to the possibility of that maintenance. The British Government is well aware how the case stands, as is abundantly proved by last year's blue books, and knows what account must be taken of those pretended reforms which were to give new life to Turkey. It, however, goes on treading in the same paths, risks running counter to the sentiments of a party which gathers strength every day, and is ever upbraiding the Government with having in the East a policy hostile both to civilisation and Christianity, and generally stands up on the side of the Turks, well convinced that whatever tends to weaken Turkey is sure to further the ambitious views of the Russian.

France follows, so to say, a middle line ; on the one hand, it favours Turkey in its views of reformation, lending that nation money and engineers for its railways, officers to discipline its army, and pedagogues for its schools, whilst on the other she evinces the same benevolence to the Christians, and is ever ready to interfere in order to obtain some new concessions in their behalf, as if those concessions were not sure in the end to turn against Turkey. This is precisely the same policy followed by the Emperor in home affairs, where he endeavours to hold the scales even between the liberals and the clericals. He is convinced that the slightest spark in the East may light up an immense conflagration, and he does all he can to impede the bursting out of the fire. Remember that saying of his to Baron Rothschild which I mentioned to you a few years back—"We have nothing to fear so long as Turkey is on her feet, but if once she falls then will everything come to utter confusion." And that is the secret of French policy in the East.

Austria has for a long time sided with England. That same spirit of craft and distrust with regard to Russia, coupled to her own interest—similar, so to say, to that of Turkey, for, being formed of the same heterogeneous elements, she is exposed to the same jeopardy —had made of her the champion of Turkey ; but during the last few years, in consequence of the changes brought about in the politics and alliances of courts and cabinets, Austria is no longer " such a Turk" in her affections, and would seem to have taken to the conservative and temporising policy of France, viz., let the old tree remain standing till it fall of itself, and meanwhile watch over the young shoots which jut out from its trunk ; but, above all, to shield Europe from the immense commotion which the sudden fall of the Ottoman empire would infallibly give rise to. Such would seem to be at once the aim both of Austria and France.

But is this commotion, this confusion, to employ the word of an august personage, so utterly unavoidable, and is it impossible to hit upon some solution of this Eastern problem which may spare Europe such cruel evils. Doubtless if the European states contemplate sharing among themselves the spoils of the " sick man "—such was, if you recollect, the appellation given by the Emperor Nicholas to his Turkish neighbour—the sharing of the plunder will needs give rise to bloody broils. But besides such a solution, equally unjust and impolitic, there may be another offering greater justice and less danger, which would be, as soon as the inheritance becomes vacant, to call to it the natural heirs—I mean the populations violently dispossessed of their territory by the Turks—who conquered them, it is true, but who have been powerless to absorb them in their own nationality, and who are still standing on the ground they erst possessed, repudiating all solidarity, and having nought in common with their masters. These populations belong to three different races of men—three distinct nationalities, the Greek, the Slave or Sclavonic, and the Rouman—and, therefore, have a natural affinity with the three states, Hellenic, Serbian, and Rouman, which have been created out of those provinces which, little by little, have been wrested from Turkey, and whose capitals—Athens, Belgrade, and Bucharest—form a natural centre of attraction for all those sister populations, not only of Turkey, but of Austria.

Greece, which became an independent kingdom A.D. 1830, is at this present moment governed by a prince of the royal family of Denmark, married to a grand-duchess of Russia. Roumania and Serbia form two principalities, tributary to Turkey, but in reality independent of that power, and ruled over—one, Roumania, by a prince of the house of Prussia, the other by a dynasty of native princes.

Is it not at once likely and desirable that these three states, which would then compose a population of seven to eight million souls each, should one day be called upon to fill the place of decayed Turkey, and form, by their junction beneath a federal bond, the united states of Eastern Europe?

This digression, Sir, will perhaps appear somewhat long to your readers, but I could hardly do better, since circumstances have accidentally brought me to Turkey, than to speak to them of Turkish politics, and lay before them a full and complete view of that Eastern question which is ever before the eyes of the courts and cabinets of Europe. Ere a month has elapsed, God willing, I shall be back in Paris, and we will again converse together of all that is talked of in Paris.

Argus Melbourne,  1868  http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article5831218