Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/81

Rh for a ball given in London to the Grand Turk.

These things too are now passed away. The Turk went back; Crete was again bowed down under his yoke, and I suppose the people of India paid his bill. I remember saying my own say at the time pretty much as I have said it now. Then came a lull. There was comparatively little to make us think of Turks, Greeks or Slaves, till the beginning of the present struggle for freedom. Of course, as will always happen where there is unceasing oppression there has been unceasing discontent and occasional outbreaks. But till this year there was nothing to make the affairs of South-Eastern Europe the chief object of one's thoughts. But now that time has come again. The deliverance of Eastern Christendom has again become the thought which must stand foremost in the mind of every one whose love of right and freedom is not pent up within certain limits on the map. The great strife between right and wrong has again begun, and it has begun in a shape which leads us to hope that we are now really seeing the beginning of the end. For my own part, such news as has been now coming for months from Bosnia and Herzegovina would in any case have stirred my soul to its inmost depths. The wrongs of the West have been redressed; the rod of the oppressor has been broken; Italy is free; Germany is united; France is humbled; Austria is reformed. Is not then the moment come for the yet bitterer wrongs of South-Eastern Europe to be redressed also? Lombardy and Venetia are set free from the whips of the Austrian; has not the day at last come for the Greek and Slave and Albanian and Bulgarian lands to be set free from the scorpions of the Turk? Thoughts like these would have been stirring even in the quiet of one's own home; but they have pressed themselves upon me with tenfold force since a journey planned long ago with other objects has given me the means of seeing and hearing somewhat for myself. I have been able to tread the lands where the strife for freedom is actually going on, to speak with men who have borne their part in the struggle, to learn what is the feeling of men in lands which are themselves free from the dangers of the strife, but whose sons look with brotherly friendship on the men who are engaged in the great and righteous work.

In saying this, I do not wish any one to suppose that I can give such readers as I may find any special information which they cannot find elsewhere. In the present war the English public has had the great advantage of having the facts of the case clearly and truly set before it. It is a great gain that in this matter the Times has mainly taken the right side, and still more that it has been well served by its correspondent on the spot. Every letter in that paper which comes from Ragusa is worth reading and pondering over. By great good luck, the usual purveyor of chatter, the correspondent who tells us what he had for dinner and how many princes he talked to, seems to have found a more congenial sphere elsewhere. The paper from which many Englishmen take their opinions as well as their facts is luckily represented at the present seat of war by a well-informed and trustworthy man, who has had long experience of Turkish doings and of revolts against them, and who is not above putting plain facts into rational English. I have no means of adding anything in the way of mere fact to the accounts which it is to be hoped every one at home has read for himself. All that I can do is to put forward again an old story, old arguments, but a story and arguments which have lost none of their strength by being old. And with me at least they have gained a certain freshness now that they are to me no longer merely matters of book-learning, but are in part at least founded on actual eyesight. Even a few hours on Turkish ground brings more clearly home to one what Turkish rule is. And one cannot be long in the land to which the Turk is a neighbour without finding out that his neighbours have very different notions about the "Eastern question," about "the integrity and independence of the Ottoman Empire," from those which have been so long thought the correct thing in the West. Those cant phrases of diplomacy may still satisfy some readers, and even some writers in England; they do not satisfy anybody in Dalmatia. These men see the wolf at their door, preying on their neighbours' flocks if not on their own, and it is not so easy as it is here to make them believe that the ravenous beast is a harmless and useful watch-dog. Here in the West we are told of a succession of beautiful promises of reform made by sultan after sultan to their Christian subjects. Some of us are actually simple enough to believe that these promises were meant to be fulfilled, or even that they have been fulfilled. In Dalmatia, where the victims of these broken promises come trooping bodily over the 