Page:Note of an English republican on the Muscovite crusade (IA noteofenglishrep00swiniala).pdf/20

 can reasonably say that Mr. Carlyle has even as fair a claim to speak against any wrongdoing in the world as either of his momentary colleagues, Mr. Freeman and Mr. Gladstone. History will perhaps account it the purest and most memorable right of the last-named statesman to aught of high or honourable remembrance, that he was once the champion of Poerio in his years of martyr's agony, and the scourger of Ferdinand II. in his devil's hour of good fortune. I shall not be suspected by any man, and by no honest man shall I be accused, of preference for Mohammedan rather than Christian cruelties, of more tenderness for Eastern than for Western tyranny. I see nothing holier in a Sultan than in a Czar, in the wane of the now misnamed crescent than in the advance of the heavy and homicidal cross which has been laid too hard already on too many a tribe and nation; but if we were compelled to choose between a waxing and a waning evil, between a tyranny which at its utmost can but cling to the fast narrowing limits of its possible power and a tyranny which in the fullness of its triumph would threaten the very light and life of liberty and of justice, of righteousness and of reason upon earth—in that case I confess myself unable to understand how any but the lovers of darkness could bid us cast in our lot with the stronger. Anarchy on the verge of dissolution,—and such an anarchy, we are assured on all hands, is the existing empire of the Turk—however horrible may be the evils wrought and the agonies inflicted by the death-struggle and fierce convulsions of its own, is impotent