Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/87

Rh own land, I have no ill-feeling whatever. I have no ill-feeling towards Persia. The Persian nation gradually adopted Mahometanism, though, in adopting it, they gave it a new form of their own. Persia is really a Mahometan county: the few men of any other religion, Christian or heathen, are, in the strictest sense, dissenters. It is open to them to make the same claims, and to fight the same battle, as a dissenting minority anynhere else: but they cannot claim to be themselves the nation; they cannot call the Mahometan majority intruders or invaders. And what is true of Persia is true also of a large part of the Ottoman dominions in Asia. The country is really Mahometan, and I have no wish to meddle with its Mahometan occupants. It is true that they have displaced a Christian population; but they displaced it so long ago that no practical question can arise out of the displacement, any more than out of our own displacement of the Welsh in Britain. But the case in European Turkey is quite different. There the Mahometans are in no sense the people of the land; they are an army of occupation, holding down subject nations in their own land. That welding together of conquerors and conquered into a single nation, which has legalized conquest in so many other cases, has never happened in the case of the Turks in Europe, and in truth it never can happen. The peaceful fusion of the two races, the absorption of the Frank by the Gaul or of the Norman by the Englishman, never can happen where the conquerors are Mahometans, and where the conquered cleave to their national faith. One of the first principles of the Mahometan religion is that, wherever its votaries have dominion, men of all other religions shall be their subjects. Koran, tribute, or sword still remains the alternative as it was in the days of Omar. By payment of tribute, the conquered Christian, fireworshipper, or Hindoo secured his life, his property, and the free exercise of his religion. But he still remained one of a subject class in his own land. Then and now alike, he is not only politically the subject of a Mahometan sovereign; he is civilly and socially the inferior of every one of his Mahometan fellow-subjects. What the Mahometan law prescribes for tributaries of another religion is a contemptuous toleration. If persecution is forbidden on the one hand, any real equality with men of the dominant religion is forbidden on the other. When such a state of things as this has been the law, it has naturally followed that the treatment of Christians and other non-Mahometan subjects of Mahometan powers has varied greatly in different times and places. Cases may here and there be found in which the subject, the Giaour, got better terms than the capitulation of Omar gave him. In most cases he has got far worse terms. The Turk has everywhere been worse than the Saracen whom he supplanted, and the Ottoman Turk has been the worst of all Turks. In fact, when it is laid down as a matter of religious principle that men of other religions are the natural inferiors and subjects of the Mussulman, it is hardly to be expected that the Mussulman will keep himself within the letter of any capitulation. Where the law prescribes a contemptuous toleration, oppression and persecution are always likely to be the rule in practice. So it ever has been; so, in the nature of things, it ever must be. Let the capitulation of Omar be carried out to the letter throughout the Ottoman dominions; the Christian populalationpopulation [sic] will still be in a state worse than the state which in other lands has been commonly looked on as fully justifying revolt. They will still be worse off than ever Lombard was under Austrian or Pole under Russian rule. But it is quite certain that the Christians of Turkey are far worse off than the capitulation of Omar would make them, and it is quite certain that they will remain so as long as they remain under a Mahometan government. The Porte may make endless promises of reform; but, even if it wishes to carry them out, it cannot. A Mahometan government cannot, if it will, give real equality to the subjects of other religions. If it does so, it sins against the first principles of the Mahometan law, and it must draw upon itself the ill-will — from their own principles the perfectly just ill-will — of its Mahometan subjects. One Mahometan ruler did give perfect equality to his subjects of all religions; but, in so doing, he had to cease to be a Mahometan. If Abd-ul-aziz has strength to follow in the steps of Akbar, let him do so, and the blessings of mankind will be on him. That would settle the Eastern question at once. But there is no intermediate choice between that settlement and that other settlement which the patriots of the Slave provinces are seeking with their swords. As a Christian, as an Akbarite, sovereign, the Turkish sultan may go on and reign as the Caesar of the New Rome, and the weapons which are now lifted against him may be used for his defence against a 