Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/84

74 Such governments may be better or worse; some may be positively bad; but they are not essentially and incurably bad. A government may be bad, because it is a government of strangers offensive to national feeling, or because, though it is not a government of strangers, yet it is in the exclusive possession of one class of the nation. Such governments are bad governments; still they are governments. They discharge — at least there is nothing to hinder them from discharging — the primary duties of a government; life, property, female honour, may be safe under them, and equal justice may be done in all matters of merely private interest. But the so-called Turkish government does none of these things; it can do none of these things. The Turks are still, as they have been ever since they landed in Europe, a mere horde of invaders. That they landed five hundred years ago makes no difference. A government is not unlawful merely because it had its beginning in a foreign conquest. A government which began in foreign conquest may be legalized in the course of time, sometimes in the course of a very short time. It is legalized as soon as the conquerors and the conquered feel themselves parts of one nation, with common national interests and feelings. It matters nothing to a modern Englishman, it mattered very little to an Englishman of the reign of Henry the Second, on which side his forefathers had fought on Senlac or at Ely. It matters nothing to a modern Frenchman whether his forefathers were Gaul or Frank, Iberian or West-Goth. But it matters now, just as much as it mattered five hundred years back, whether a man in Turkey is a Turk or a subject of the Turk. England is the land of the English; France is the land of the French; but Turkey is not the land of the Turks; it is the land where the Turks hold other nations in bondage. The process of conquest which in other cases came to an end sooner or later, in some cases marvellously soon, has in South-Eastern Europe gone on to this day. The distinctions, national and religious, which existed five hundred years ago are as broadly drawn now as they were then. The Greek, the Slave, the other nations under the Turkish power, remain now as distinct from the Turk as they were in the days of the first conquest. The sultan is to his Christian subjects no more a national sovereign now than he was five hundred years back. He was an alien master then, and he remains an alien master now. Nowhere do the Turk and the Christian look on one another as fellow-countrymen, as all the inhabitants of France or of England look on one another, however distinct and hostile their forefathers may have been in remote ages. At the end of half a millennium, the so-called Turkish government remains what it was at the beginning. The Turks remain as they were then, an army of occupation in a conquered land. The chief difference is that the army of occupation was under far better discipline then than it is now. The early sultans were all of them wise rulers; some of them were, according to their light, just rulers. Some of them had no mind to oppress the conquered any more than was needful to secure the power of the conquerors. Under the great sultans, the lot of the conquered was a hard one; still it was a lot marked out according to certain rules and laws. Oppression might go so far but no further; and there was some hope in the last refuge of the oppressed, that of flying from petty tyrants to the throne. Under the little sultans, this last hope has long passed away. Read in the letters from Ragusa in the Times what the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina suffer at the hands of their petty tyrants, and judge whether they are likely to gain anything by flying to the throne of Abd-ul-aziz.

The so-called Turkish government is then, I say, no government at all. It has no claim on the allegiance of those whom it calls its subjects. Founded on wrong in the beginning, it has kept on the first wrong to this day. It has never, even after five hundred years, become a national government. It has never, in all those ages, had any feeling or interest in common with those of the nations over whom it has borne sway. It has never done for them even those common duties of government which the worst of civilized governments does for its subjects. The Turk is still as much an alien in European Turkey as he was when the land first began to take his name. The sultan may be our dear and cherished ally, he may be knight of the Garter and guest of the lord mayor, but he is none the less the chief of an intruding horde, dwelling by force in the lands and houses of other men. What kind of treatment it is that Turkish rule carries with it. Englishmen may learn from the letters from Ragusa in the Times. In Herzegovina, as elsewhere, the causes of revolutions and their immediate occasions are not always the same. The cause is doubtless the abiding determination of 