Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 131.djvu/786

780 honor, and all the relief the poor Christians of Turkey reaped from the war was some magniloquent compliments to the generosity, benevolence, and "constant solicitude for the welfare of his subjects," for which the sultan of Turkey was so conspicuously distinguished! This is the cant in which the diplomatists of Europe thought it decent to indulge. They sowed the wind, and they are now reaping the whirlwind. Russia was then beaten and humbled. The purblind policy of her conquerors has now given her a magnificent revenge. The Christian populations, who might have been gradually erected into a sure barrier against Russian aggression, but whom a cynical and short-sighted diplomacy delivered over to their old oppressor, are now the lever-power of Russian intervention in south-eastern Europe.

And now let me give my reasons for the distinction which I have drawn between Turkish and other atrocities. The distinction is this: that other governments may forsake their evil ways, and "rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things," but that the Turkish government cannot. And for the following reason.

It has already been stated that the government of Turkey is strictly theocratic, and its Magna Charta is the Koran. Certainly the precepts of the Koran are, many of them, immoral and cruel enough. A conquered people, for example, cease to have any rights whatever. The women and children become slaves in the most absolute sense, and all the male adult population incur the penalty of death, and may be disposed of in any manner which the capricious will of the victor may dictate. This means that if the Turks could conquer Servia they could reduce all the women and children to slavery, and kill all the men, or deal with them in any other way they pleased. Of course they would not act in this manner, for they know that Europe would not allow it. But no feeling of conscience would restrain them, for they would simply be obeying one of the fundamental precepts of their religion.

It is idle to compare, as Sale and others have done, these brutal and ferocious doctrines to the rules imposed on the Israelites for the conquest of Canaan. These were provisional and for a limited purpose, and were never intended, as precepts of the Koran are intended, to govern the relation of the Jews to all the Gentile world. Besides, to say nothing of the supersession of Judaic morality by the gospel, it must not be forgotten that alongside of the Pentateuch there grew up a school of teachers sent by the God of Israel to proclaim and inculcate truth, and justice, and mercy, not as between Jew and Jew merely, but as between man and man. The essential unity of those whom the common father of all had "made of one flesh" was a truth preached by a long line of prophets, mitigating the severity of the old. law, and growing in brightness till it received its highest expression in him in whom law and prophets were fulfilled.

Alongside of the Koran, too, there has grown up a multitudinous array of expositors whose dicta are held sacred. There are four great schools, but each of these has thrown off a swarm of traditional precepts and maxims which are law to the true believer. Of these four schools the Arabs and other Semitic and African races have adopted three among them. The Turks, on their conversion to Islam, adopted the fourth, or Hanefee school, whose precepts and principles happen to be the most cruel and immoral. The result has been to develop in the Turk a character of exceptional sensuality and cruelty. It is Mr. Palgrave, I think, who on this account characterizes the Turk as the "Cameronian of Mahometans" — a compliment which the Cameronian would decline.

It is not, then, on the Koran simply that the character of the Turk is moulded and his administration of justice based, but on text-books founded on the Koran, but compared with which the Koran itself, bad as it is, is a code of purity and mercy. Mr. Palgrave, speaking of the occasional attempts of the Western powers to modify the rampant iniquity of the Turkish courts of justice, says, —


 * To use a technical phrase, the establishment of non-denominational tribunals seemed no less inevitable than that of non-denominational schools; and it was precisely the having recourse to such that the Moslims could not stomach. In Islam, and Islam alone, they lived, and moved, and had their being; and Islam, and no other, should or could be, they hold, their arbiter and judge. ("Essays on Eastern Questions," p. 137.)

Now the received and most authoritative text-book of Mahometan law in Turkey, that from which no judge or advocate ever dreams of appealing, contains, among others, the following precepts: —


 * And the tributary is to be distinguished in

