Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 102.djvu/84

72 alone the lecturer attributes nine-tenths of the present decay and old age of every Mussulman nation, and maintains that until it be utterly abolished, all Western civilisation and capital, and all the civil and religious liberty on earth, will not avail one jot toward their revival.

And here we must not omit mention of his allusions (in the Preface) to the state and prospects of Turkey. He doubts the possibility of the "regeneration" of any nation which has sunk, "not into mere valiant savagery, but into effete and profligate luxury"—of any people which has "lost the one great quality which was the tenure of its existence, military skill." He bids us remember the Turkish armies of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, "when they were the tutors and models of all Europe in the art of war," and then ponder on the fact of their now requiring to be "officered by foreign adventurers" to be kept going or standing at all. "When, in the age of Theodosius, and again in that of Justinian, the Roman armies had fallen into the same state; when the Italian legions required to be led by Stilicho the Vandal, and the Byzantine by Belisar the Sclav and Narses the Persian, the end of all things was at hand, and came; and it will come soon to Turkey." The Turkish empire, as it now exists, seems to Mr. Kingsley "an altogether unrighteous and worthless thing," which stands no longer upon the assertion of the greath truth of Islam, but on the merest brute force and oppression. But then, if Turkey deserves to fall, and must fall, let it not fall (he is careful to add) by any treachery of ours. "Whatsoever element of good is left in the Turk, to that we must appeal as our only means, if not of saving him, still of helping him to a quiet euthanasia and absorption into a worthier race of successors." Parson Lot, the Christian Socialist, the author of "Alton Locke," will not be suspected of Russian sympathies; and if, as he says he does, he looks with sad forebodings on the destiny of the war, it is because of the promises made by "our own selfish shortsightedness," under the "hollow name of the Cause of Order," that "the wrongs of Italy, Hungary, Poland, Sweden, shall remain unredressed, and that Prussia and Austria, two tyrannies, the one far more false and hypocritical, the other even more rotten than that of Turkey, shall, if they will but observe a hollow and uncertain neutrality (for who can trust the liar and the oppressor?)—be allowed not only to keep their ill-gotten spoils, but even now to play into the hands of our foe, by guarding his Polish frontier for him, and keeping down the victims of his cruelty, under pretence of keeping down those of their own." Here, as throughout this paper, we leave the lecturer to speak for himself, and forbear caution or comment; for so many and so knotty are the debateable things involved in these pages, that had we tarried to inquire and take exception, our present terminus would be but the initial à quo instead of the ultimate ad quem.