comprising Travels in the Regions of the Lower Danube, in 1850-51. By a British Resident of Twenty Years in the East. 3 Vols. 8vo. London: Bentley. 1853.
IT is not, perhaps, a matter of abstract necessity that every form of civilization should, in its turn, pass through the phases of stagnation, decay, and decomposition. We can imagine the possibility of some favored race so lending itself to the purposes of Providence, as to keep up with the march of humanity, and undergo its successive transformations without violence. Hitherto, however, no such goodly sight has presented itself in real history. One form of civilization after another has risen, thriven for a season, failed in appropriating some essential element of conservation or development, and disappeared, to make way for others ; so that human progress can be characterised as a long conflict, marked at intervals by ‘ nations dying with their gods.’
The lessons to be drawn from this chequered history were long comparatively disregarded ; but the world is growing older and more thoughtful, and the present generation, among Christian nations at least, is more disposed than any of the preceding to look back upon the road over which mankind has toiled, treasuring up its remembrances, rendering long-forgotten scenes and persons once more familiar, and discovering and deciphering the records of extinct civilization. We have learned to interpret great changes with reference to their moral causes, and no longer look upon conquests as exclusively results of physical force or military skill. All earnest thinkers, even those who are themselves little influenced by any religious principle, have come to see that the religion which is at the foundation of any given people’s social life and political institutions, is the secret of that people’s strength, or of its weakness. It is for this reason that we can prepare to behold the last moments of the once mighty Ottoman Empire with more intelligent interest than other generations can have felt upon witnessing similar spectacles.
The evils which are hurrying Turkey to dissolution are not such as, taken in themselves severally, of even all together, would be incurable, were there not at the bottom the radical principle from which they have originated, and which obliges us to pronounce those symptoms fatal, that would otherwise only be dangerous. In the European half of the Empire, for instance, the Moslems have to maintain in subjection a population three or four times more numerous than themselves. In other countries this danger and disadvantage could be remedied, by making friends and equals of the subject people, as has been done in Ireland under similar circumstances, and with races in about the same proportion ; but this is impossible here. Unless the Turk renounce the fundamental maxims of the creed that sent him forth on the world with a scimitar in his right hand, the Christian must be treated as an inferior, who can only be allowed to exist by sufferance. There can be no amalgamation between the conqueror and the subject; the Koran has put an impassable barrier between them ; they are, and must remain, aliens to each other. Nay, that true believers cannot enter into the same civil organization with Christians ; they cannot be authorities in the same village ; so that, wherever the Turks did not exterminate the Christians, they were obliged to leave these last a sort of subordinate municipal order of their own, the Commune choosing its own Judges, and distributing among its members their several portions of the burdens imposed upon the whole. The system has, in a high degree, contributed to maintain the distinct nationality of the Rayahs, as the Christians are called ; it has facilitated the independence of those who have shaken off the yoke, and will do so on a larger scale. Thus the emancipation of the Greek, and of the wild borderer of the Danube, was partially prepared by the very extreme of disdain and aversion with which they were regarded.
The oppressions of the administration, the corruption of public functionaries, the neglect of the vast mineral and agricultural resources of the country, the squalid poverty of the people, the uncertain tenure of property, the financial embarassments, menacing national bankruptcy,—these are evils with which, in other countries, enlightened energy could grapple ; but here, they are the result of the theocratic character which has made the Turkish people what they are, and is the base of all their institutions. For the Mahometan, despotism is the law of the universe : his God is a despot, stern and terrible, almighty Will without any bowels of tenderness or compassion, who seeks not for children, but for subjects, and has intrusted a military hierarchy with the apostleship of the sword. Hence, every attempt to introduce an element of liberty into Turkish institutions is found to clash with the very spirit of their civilization. The arbitrary power of the meanest Aga in his sphere is representative of that which the Sultan wields in his ; and to limit either is to violate divine order. The Turk cannot cultivate the arts of peace with the same settled purpose that others do ; for his mission is one of war and conquest; he is like a military colonist, encamped, rather than established, in Europe. Or if, yielding to circumstances and to the instinct of the real calling of man, he do turn artisan, agriculturist, miner, he cannot condescend to borrow the profane science of the infidels ; for his own superiority is, in his mind, one great evidence of the truth of his religion. He cannot so much as entertain the idea of human progress ; for Mahomet did but attempt to restore the abstract monotheism, which he conceived had been the starting-point of the Jewish faith twenty-six centuries before ; so that the world began its history over again, without anything new to learn or to do. Strange connexion between the general tendencies of a national character and the most minute details ! The haughty gravity with which the Turk retains the costume of his predecessors, and smiles at our frivolous changes of fashion, is just one of the harmless exhibitions of an incurable, inflexible conservatism.
Turkey has to guard against the encroachments of one of the first military powers in the world mistress of her frontiers, and bent upon her conquest with an ardent ambition, that has been bequeathed from generation to generation. But, sustained as she is by the political interests of the rest of Europe, Turkey need not fear even Russia, if she could be sure of her own population. This she is not, and cannot be : the interests and affections of just that half of the empire which is most exposed to danger, go with the enemy ; and, while the Græco-Sclavonians are increasing in numbers, in wealth, and in intelligence, the Moslem population is being gradually diminished, partly by the misery produced through the operation of causes above mentioned, partly by immorality and polygamy. But this latter element of decay cannot be corrected any more than the others :—it is consecrated by the Koran.
Bitter experience has, indeed, taught the ranks to feel their inferiority, and that their national existence depends upon assimilation to European civilization. Of course, if this conviction carried them far enough, it would become a means of social and political regeneration ; but no people can either do without a religious system, or avoid undergoing the influences of this religious system, so long as it is looked upon as true. Nothing short of embracing Christianity could thoroughly emancipate the Turks from the consequences of their past training; and of this there is not, apparently, the slightest immediate prospect. Hence, the consciousness of inferiority in the arts of both peace and war only leads those who feel it to despondency, or to an apathetic acquiescence in the decrees of inexorable fate. The follower of the Prophet, unable to conquer and yet unwilling to renounce his mission as a delusion, still grasps his broken sword, instead of turning it into a ploughshare. The fever has been followed by collapse ; and the faith that once made him the terror of the world, is his weakness now. Under these circumstances, the attempts that have been made at improvement in various ways, at administrative and financial reform in particular, have proved to be but half measures, condemned to inevitable failure : new pieces sewn upon the old garment, making the rent worse, and demonstrating the impossibility of patching up a worn-out order of things with fragments borrowed from a society that had been created by a principle essentially different. The same experiment of superficial Europeanization was made in Turkey Proper, and in Egypt; and it has failed, even in the latter, though Mehemet Ali had to contend with no ambitious Christian neighbours and with no indigenous Christian population of any importance, there being but a hundred thousand Copts remaining in the Valley of the Nile. —London Quarterly Review.
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