Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/83

Rh  and drive us out of it; but we will never again be his subjects." The question is what those who have hitherto made it their business to keep certain nations under the Turkish yoke are to do, now that those nations have declared that they will endure anything rather than the Turkish yoke. There may be many ways of breaking the yoke, but those who are under it have made up their minds that it shall be broken in some way or other. Even now diplomatists are chattering about for their promises of reform, about a separation of this and that district, about the change of this and that governor. None of these things touch the root of the matter. The people of the revolted lands know that no faith is to be placed in Turkish promises. They do not want reforms at the hand of the Turk; what they want is freedom from the Turk and all that belongs to him. Some years back the people of Lombardy and Venetia told the world that what they wanted was not reform at the hand of the Austrian, but freedom from the Austrian. There were men then who thought that the bondage of Italy was as needful for the interests of mankind as some think that the bondage of Bosnia and Herzegovina is now. But Europe in general did not think so; and Italy is free. Now in Turkey the state of things against which the Italians rose would come in the shape of a great and blessed reform. The Christian subjects of the Turk would be glad indeed to find themselves now no worse off than the Italian subjects of the Austrian were then. But mark the different measures meted out to nations east and west of the Hadriatic Gulf. On one side we applaud men for rising against a government, because it is offensive to national feeling. On the other side we bid men lie down quietly under a government which refuses them the common rights of human beings. Such a government they declare as one man that they will endure no longer. By so doing they have reopened the Eastern question. That question certainly admits of more than one answer; but before we get any answer, we must settle what is to be the shape of the question. Here, with many minds the Eastern question means how to keep the Turk in. In the lands where the Turk is something more than a name, the Eastern question means how to turn the Turk out.

I have in the course of this article more than once, of set purpose, made use of phrases which I know will provoke controversy. I have called the Turks barbarians; I have called them an invading horde. These are the kind of phrases which I know are specially offensive to those who have taken on themselves the strange mission of defending the continued bondage of a large part of Europe. But it is well to set before men's minds, even at the risk of repeating a thrice-told tale or a hundred-times-told tale, what the real state of the case is. It is well again to show what the system really is which the victims of the Turk are striving to overthrow, and which his abettors in England and elsewhere are striving to prolong. To them no phrase is more offensive than to be told that the Turks are an Asiatic horde encamped in Europe. No phrase is more offensive, because no phrase is more true. The usual art of the defenders of the Turk is to speak of the Turkish power as if it were an ordinary government, to speak of revolt against it as if it were an ordinary case of revolt against a government. They perhaps do not go so far as to say that the Turkish government is a good government; but they certainly wish people to believe that it is a government, in the same sense in which the monarchies and commonwealths of other parts of Europe are governments. Now the one point to be clearly understood is that the state of things in South-Eastern Europe is not an ordinary case of government, good or bad. It is a case of subjection to a power which has no right to be called a government at all. The governments of civilized countries may be, and are, better or worse, more or less in accordance with national feeling. There may be under them more or less of political freedom: the judicial and administrative system may be more or less well contrived, more or less purely carried out in practice. Still, in all of these governments, in all the various shades between pure despotism and pure democracy, the government at least professes to act on behalf of the general body of its subjects or citizens, for the good of that general body. The worst European government professes to do equal justice between man and man in private causes, and, for the most part, the profession is pretty fairly carried out. When it is otherwise, it is commonly owing to some defect in the particular law, to some corruption on the part of the particular administrator of the law. It is not commonly owing to anything in the constitution of the governing power which makes it absolutely incapable of doing justice, even if it wishes to do it. 