Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/78

Mahometans under Christian oppressors. But for myself personally the matter had also an interest of another kind. The political wrong against which we strove was but the continuation of a great historic wrong. The historic wrong had in truth no small share in bringing about the political wrong. The schism between the Eastern and Western Churches, the rivalry between the Eastern and Western Empires, had wrought a lasting effect on the minds of many who had never heard of either Church or either Empire. A kind of dislike and contempt towards the Christian nations of the East had been fostered for ages in the minds of the Christian nations of the West. The "Greek of the Lower Empire" was held up to scorn as the type of everything that was vile, and the modern Greek was held to be, if anything, a little viler than his Byzantine forefather. Of the great mass of the Christian subjects of the Turk, the Slaves and the Bulgarians, many people seem never to have heard at all. All members of the Eastern Church were jumbled together under the common name of Greeks. Up to that time the Eastern Church had often been looked at with some sympathy by Protestants, as having a common enemy at Rome; but that Church was now suddenly found out to be something worse even than the pope himself. People in Western Europe who protested against the oppressions of Russia or Austria often had no more real knowledge about Italians, Poles, and Hungarians than they had about Greeks, Slaves, and Bulgarians. But they had at least not been brought up with a prejudice of ages against Italians, Poles, or Hungarians. People therefore came to look with sympathy on the victims of Russia and Austria, while they looked with a kind of suspicion upon the victims of the Turk. They also made the great discovery that the Turk had some of the virtues, or apparent virtues, which are commonly found in masters, while his victims had some of the vices which are always found in slaves. It would have been too much trouble to stop and think that the vices of the slave ought to go in some measure to the account of those who made him a slave. It was enough that the Turk had some virtues, and his Christian subjects some vices. He was, by force of this argument, ruled to be altogether in the right, and his Christian subjects to be altogether in the wrong. Then there came in the great Russian bugbear. We were told that, even if the Christians of Turkey had grievances, it was no time to think about them or talk about them when all Europe had a much greater grievance. Greek, Slave, Bulgarian were to be taught a lesson of self-sacrifice; they were to be taught to sit down quietly under real and undoubted evils at the hands of the Turk, because Western Europe had chosen to take into its head that some unknown and shadowy evil was coming on mankind at the hands of the Russian. Then, as usual, to the help of all this mass of falsehood, fallacies, and half-truths, came that dense mass of invincible ignorance which always plays so great a part at all times of popular excitement. Many people could not be made to see the difference between Turkey and the Turks. Because in Western Europe England and the English, France and the French, mean much the same things, they could not understand a state of things in which the Turks were not Turkey, but simply the invaders and oppressors of Turkey. I remember a meeting in some midland town. Derby, I think it was, where a resolution was passed in honour of the "glorious patriotic spirit of the Turkish nation." The same people would certainly not have passed a resolution in honour of the "glorious patriotic spirit of the Austrian nation," when Radctzky set forth to win back Lombardy. That "the glorious patriotic spirit of the Turkish nation" simply meant the obstinate determination of a horde of robbers to keep possession of the houses and lands of other men, certainly never entered the heads of the good people who passed the resolution. They doubtless thought that there was a Turkish nation living in Turkey, just as there is an English nation living in England, and a French nation living in France. We heard much in those days about the "rights of the sultan," and it was not everybody who