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