cannot pay the taxes, of the decline of trade, of the decrease of wealth even among the richer families, of mines unworked, because the functionaries from whom the concession must be obtained break faith or demand extravagant bribes. In a disorganized and dying empire it usually happens that a provincial governor or satrap makes himself independent and establishes a government stronger if not better than the one he has revolted from. The Porte guards against this danger by changing its local governors very frequently; and what is the result? A good governor — for there are good governors even in Turkey — is taken away just when he has begun to know something of his district, and all the sooner if it is suspected that he is popular there. A bad one — and considering the nature of the court influences by which they are appointed, it is not surprising that most of them should be heartily bad — makes the most of his short tenure by squeezing every piastre he can out of his wretched subjects, whether by way of taxes or bribes or of plain downright extortion. And in both sets of cases all continuity and regularity of administration, all possibility of carrying out reforms, is destroyed by these frequent changes.[1]
From the unspeakable misery which this misrule causes, the Mohammedan population suffers, not indeed so much as the Christian, because the former have more chance of protection from the courts of law, may carry arms, and are less liable to be robbed or bastinadoed by a brother Muslim, but still quite enough to entitle them to our earnest sympathy. It is surely a mistake in dealing with this question, to endeavor to set creed against creed, and enlist European feeling on behalf of the Christians only. It is also a mistake to make the indictment against the Porte appear to rest on isolated acts of cruelty and revenge, however hideous. It rests upon a long course of migovernment, persevered in after repeated warnings, which has reduced some of the richest countries in the world to beggary, which makes the lives of their inhabitants wretched, which produces the state of society wherein massacres like that of May last had become possible.
Notwithstanding these facts, which might be supposed to have by this time become pretty well known in the west, people talk about the integrity of the Turkish empire, the importance of maintaining the status quo, etc., etc. Now, you cannot maintain the status quo. As a great German writer has somewhere said, there is in the moral and political, as in the material world, no such thing as a status quo. All is change and motion, if not from worse to better, then from better to worse. You may keep Turkey unscathed by foreign invasion. You may aid the sultan to suppress revolts within. But you will not thereby, no, nor by exacting a hundred promises of reform, arrest that sure and steady though silent process of decay which has been going on for the last century or more, and makes the government more and more powerless for everything but evil. You cannot prevent the empire from one day falling to pieces, after another era of silent oppression varied by revolts and massacres. You may make that era longer, but it will end at last, and when it ends, the hatred of Muslim and Christian, more bitter now than twenty years ago, will probably have become more bitter still.
It is their impatience of this tyranny and their belief that while the other powers — England and Austria especially — desire simply to maintain the status quo, Russia alone is willing and able to help them, that has accustomed the Christians of Turkey to look to Russia, and has given her the influence she now enjoys. Nothing can be more natural, nor do we need either secret societies or Russian emissaries (though for aught I know Russian emissaries may be at work, like moles, on every Bulgarian farm) to account for so simple a phenomenon. These poor people are surely not to be cut off from all hope: and what conceivable loyalty or duty can they owe to a ruling caste and government which calls them and treats them like dogs ? Which of us, under such
- ↑ It is unnecessary to discuss whether this incapacity for reform is due to religion, or to race, or to both; but a protest may be made, in passing, against the notion that the Turks deserve to be driven out of Europe because they are Asiatics, as if the Magyars, for instance, were not Asiatics in almost the same sense as the Turks. For the matter of that, the Mohammedan population of the Turkish empire are not, ethnologically speaking, Turks at all, any more than we are Normans or the modern Spaniards Visigoths. There are places in Asia Minor where you may see a few true Turks still remaining, just as in the valleys of the Asturias you may occasionally find villages where blue eyes and light hair show the permanence of a Gothic type. But the Muslims of Turkey are probably one of the most mixed races in the world, the children of those subjects of the Byzantine empire who embraced Islam at first, or have been subsequently converted to it; of slaves brought into the empire; of janizaries; of the upper class of Turks by Georgian, Circassian, Mingrelian, Greek, Slavonic mothers. And the contrast is great indeed between the heavy, languid, flabby faces of the Turkish royal family, for instance, with their drooping eyelids and rounded sensual outlines, and the firm, hard, angular, bony features, small, fierce, restless eyes, and well-knit frames of the genuine Turks or Tatars of the Aral or Caspian steppes.
