Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/79

Rh understood that the rights of the sultan over the houses and goods of Greeks, Slaves, and Bulgarians were exactly the same as the rights of a burglar to the house into which he has broken, and to the goods which he has found in it. In short, the moral confusion which condemned oppression on one side of the Hadriatic and admired it on the other, though it was largely strengthened by wilful and interested perversion, rested in the main on a deep and solid foundation of honest ignorance. The clamourers on behalf of the Turk were undoubtedly one class of that large order who call evil good and good evil; but in a vast number of cases they did so simply because they had been led honestly to mistake evil for good, and good for evil. The worst is that, when a general delusion of this kind has taken possession of the mind of a nation, the delusion cannot be got rid of till it is too late. Truth commonly gets the better in the long run; but for the time falsehoods and half-truths get so firm a hold that truth is not listened to. People may now endure to be told that it is a truer patriotism to try to keep one's country out of an unjust war than to join in a wild cry for rushing into such a war. But twenty years ago all that those who did so got for their pains was to be called unpatriotic and un-English. There is now time to pause and think before we again irrevocably commit ourselves to the cause of unrighteousness.

When all these confusions were rife twenty years back, the history of South-Eastern Europe had been for a long time a favourite subject of my thoughts and reading, though I do not profess to have ever studied it in the same detail in which I have studied some parts of western history. But I had learned enough to know — Mr. Finlay's writings alone could teach that much — how large a part of European history has been utterly misconceived through the traditional contempt for the "Greek of the Lower Empire." As commonly happens, error with regard to past history and error with regard to present policy went together; for in truth the one error was built up upon the other. In those days a writer in Blackwood's Magazine could talk, seemingly with glee, about "the last Byzantine historian being blown into the air by our brave allies the Turks." The man who wrote this nonsense perhaps really thought that, because the Turks were unluckily allies of England in the nineteenth century, therefore they must also have been allies of England in the fifteenth century. He certainly did not think it worth while to stop and think that more than one "last Byzantine historian" contrived to write the history of the very storm in which it was thus taken for granted that he must have been blown into the air. About the same time it was the fashion to write little books about the history of Crimea, in which there was always a great deal about Mithridates, always a great deal about Catherine the Second, but in which the most instructive thing in the history of the peninsula, the long life of the Greek commonwealth of Cherson, was always left out. Perhaps the writers had never heard of the fact; perhaps it was thought inexpedient to let it be known that there ever had been anywhere, least of all in Crimea, so dangerous a thing as a Greek commonwealth. There was therefore a good deal of work to be done by the mere lover of historical accuracy as well as by the lover of political freedom, and both I and others did what we could to spread abroad truer ideas on both branches of the subject. What we generally got for our pains was to be called philhellénes, and to be laughed at for troubling ourselves about "petty states." As I have read history, "petty states" have generally been the salt of the earth; and, as for the name. philhellén, I am in no way ashamed of it, if only it be not used in any exclusive sense. I am simply for right against wrong, for all the victims of the oppressor as against the oppressor, not for any one class of his victims as against any other class. I will accept the name of philhellén with gladness, if only I am allowed to add that I am equally philoslave and philobulgarian.

Those days have long passed away. Since then it has been only by fits and starts that the affairs of Eastern Christendom could be the chief object of the 