Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/77

Rh From The Fortnightly Review.

to the eastern coasts of the Hadriatic, planned long ago with objects bearing wholly on the history of past times, has lately given me a glimpse of a stirring piece of modern history, and has called my thoughts back to subjects which were more familiar to them twenty years back than they have been of late. I had longed for years to see the palace of Spalato, and the other wonders of the land which gave Rome so many of her greatest emperors. This year I had for the first time the opportunity of carrying out this wish of many years, and its carrying out in this particular year caused me to hear and see somewhat, not only of the palace at Spalato, but also of the revolt in Herzegovina. I was able to hear much of the matter from men familiar with the seat of war, and myself to get a glimpse, though only a glimpse, alike of enslaved Herzegovina and of unconquered Montenegro. These sights called up again old thoughts and old controversies. I have ever been one of those, a body sometime very few in number, who could not understand why our love of right and freedom, our hatred of wrong and oppression, should be bounded by the Hadriatic Sea. I could never understand why, while we denounced the oppression of the Austrian or the Russian, while we admired and sympathized with all who rose up against it, we were bound to uphold the far blacker oppression of the Turk, and to hurl every name of contempt and dislike at those who strove to shake off his yoke. I was one of those who raised their protest one and twenty years back, when we were entrapped by a crafty tyrant into waging war against a sovereign and a people who had never wronged us, on behalf of the foulest fabric of tyranny on earth. I could see no glory, no wisdom, nothing but the deepest national shame, in lending the arms of England to support the cause of pope and Turk against the nations of Eastern Christendom. To me the names of Alma, of Balaklava, and of Inkerman are names of national humiliation. They are records of blood shed by English hands in the cause of wrong: and blood shed in the cause of wrong, whether it be shed in victory or in defeat, is matter for shame, and not for boasting. Thus I thought and spoke when they were but few — a few there always were — who thought and spoke with me. Now that the madness of the moment is past, now that we can see things by the light of twenty more years of experience, there are more who speak, there are many more who think, as a few of us thought and spoke during the national frenzy of the Russian war. But few or many it matters not; truth is the same in either case. At Alma and Inkerman England fought for wrong, as a generation before at Navarino she had fought for right. In 1827 we fought to free a nation from its tyrants, and the good work was called an "untoward event." In 1854 we fought to keep nations in their bondage, and it became the fashion to glory in our shame. We have again the choice of good or evil opened before us; we have again to choose between the precedent of the righteous act of which we were ashamed, and the precedent of the unrighteous act in which we gloried. We can again, if we will, do something, perhaps not by fighting but certainly in some other way, either for the cause of good or for the cause of evil. We may use such influence as we may have in the councils of Europe, either on behalf of the Turkish oppressor or on behalf of the victims who have at last turned against him: God grant that whatever we do, by act or by speech, it may be in the spirit of 1827, and not in the spirit of 1854.

When I spoke and wrote about these matters twenty years back, the subject was one which had for me, as it still has, a twofold attraction. I felt that, setting aside all associations which might sway us in the matter, all considerations of past history of religion or races or language, we who spoke up for the oppressed against the oppressor were only speaking the language of simple right. We spoke on behalf of the Greek and the Slave, only as both we and others were wont to speak on behalf of the Pole, the Lombard, and the Hungarian. We spoke on behalf of Christians under Mahometan oppressors as I trust we should have spoken on behalf of 