Page:Note of an English republican on the Muscovite crusade (IA noteofenglishrep00swiniala).pdf/10

 it we may joyfully discard any possible apprehension of seeing a catechuman of his years and antecedents received at the eleventh hour into the fold or vineyard of the Eastern Church; a sight which could be profitable for edification to no mortal. Is it then in the mere secular name of mercy or of chivalry, of decency or of manhood, that 'the unspeakable Turk should be immediately struck out of the question' to make room for the unspeakable Muscovite? Nay, for very shame,—in Shakespeare's phrase, if aught so despicable as the phrase of a mere poet and player may here be cited without offence, 'for godly shame'—it cannot be on any such plea as this that the sympathy or the indignation of any creature is now invoked by the patron of Eyre Pasha, the champion of Mouravieff Bey. Not all Englishmen have yet forgotten the horror of shame, the sickness of disgust, with which they learnt how the accomplices and the satellites of the former had devised and carried out such ultra-Bulgarian atrocities as the stripping and whipping of women by men in public with scourges of 'pianoforte wire.' It was the infliction of such tortures and such outrages as these by English Bashi-Bazouks, that set those to whom the honour of humanity and of England was more than a mockery and a byword 'barking furiously in the gutter' under the guidance of the best and wisest among English philosophers and statesmen; and this also it was which evoked the vociferous acclamations and inflamed the tempestuous applause of Mr. Carlyle and his tail. We must not therefore