TURKEY AND THE BALANCE OF POWER.

(To the Editor of the Leader.)

Sir, —The question of Turkey is of more than European importance. From the first moment when those distant specks upon the horizon denoted the gathering clouds that have hung over the capital of the East, the public expectation of the Continent and of Great Britain has been directed with incessant anxiety to the Bosphorus, seeking some tangible ground of hope and some indication of encouragement. And now, the “Dead March in Saul” is already being played over the Turkish empire! When Lord Chatham exclaimed, that he could hold no discussion “with that man who did not see the interest of England in the preservation of the Ottoman Empire;” his lordship did not foresee the crisis which would call that sentence from oblivion and attach to it its due weight and importance. Yet in connection with the balance of power that sentence is of little consequence; it derives its practical application from other and more reasonable sources. Greece gave the first fatal blow to Mussulman supremacy, (In 1821, when the Sixth Vial began to pour out upon Turkey. —Editor Herald), founded upon the unconditional accordance of Western support. Ibrahim Pasha followed the bitter stroke with more effective hostilities; but as a question between Mussulman and Mussulman, not involving religious tenets nor ages of glorious memory, the fleets of Europe propped up the decrepitude of Turkey, and condemned to inaction the nervous arm that would have regenerated the enfeebled East. And this, sir, was to preserve the so-called balance of power! Well—the balance of power so marvellously preserved; this balance of power for which Europe risked a general war; this same said balance of power is now proclaimed dead; the unfortunate victim of a felo de se, without example and without parallel.

Possibly Turkey contained within itself the elements of decay. Founded upon fanaticism and the sword, and upon doctrines irreconcilable with civilisation, its only virility lay in war, its only safety in bigotry. The struggle was for life and death, and Turkey is weakened—nearly destroyed. Yet the members of the Greek Church—all fanatics, multitudes plunderers—are strong, powerful, and tending to a great nationality! The struggle here was, or must be, one of life and death also. But the ruler of Turkey, enlightened before his time and his people, prematurely chose reform; its consequences face us now.

Mahmoud—that melancholy image which rises before us with the blood of the empire oozing from every pore, was a reforming sultan. The successor to the power that thundered under the walls of Vienna and filled Christian (Not “Christian,” but papal kingdoms, styled in Scripture, “the Kingdoms of this World.”—Editor Herald) kingdoms with terror and dismay, desired to inoculate Europeanism upon the tree of Turkish life and failed; for with the blood of the Janissaries rolled through the gutters of Constantinople the last remaining hope and strength of the Ottomans. “Lord Palmerston is not the Minister of Russia or of Austria, he is the Minister of England.” Mahmoud should have lived and died the Sultan of Turkey; he forgot his mission, he misunderstood his time, and failed. Broad national characteristics are the life-blood of nationalities. Faithful to his Empire, had Mahmoud raised on high the standard of a fanaticism that had already conquered half the world, allah il allah might again have rung in the ears of the startled Viennese. Reformatory Ministries for Turkey! And the first great Liberal Minister convicted of peculations that would have overwhelmed the concoctor of the “state lotteries” with astonishment and with dismay!

Toleration for Turkey! Christian virtues and charities conferred by heathenism, and by a Government whose vitality was drawn from heathen springs. No wonder, sir, the springs refused to run. No wonder effete bashaws and weak sultans. No wonder the Turkish empire shrank, dried, (This is the language of the Apocalypse, though the writer knows it not. John says: “The sixth angel poured out his vial upon the Euphrates, and the water thereof was dried up.” The Ottoman is a dried up dominion. —Editor Herald), shrivelled up to the merest skin and bone, and existed but by the outward pressure and support necessary to keep its trembling joints within their sockets. And those poor creaking joints and this rickety skeleton are the remnants of Soliman! Yes, broad, national characteristics are the life-blood of nationalities. Modern sentimentality seeks national strength, and comprehensive, almost universal, principles. Impossible realisation. For each land has its church, its religion, and prejudices. Assimilate all these and men have no individual country worth struggling for; it is the same life in the latitude of Constantinople, of St. Petersburg, of Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and London. If we desire no nationality, let us call upon Lamartine, install him at the Invalides or Pimlico, and assist in administering the Christianised government and the Ibergallitanian republic! Turkey has fallen, then, and from the inoculation of Europeanism. The virile infidel, who braved the hammer of Martel, who stood before the greatest armies of the world, has succumbed to doctrinal discourses, and to the theories of civilisation. Is this a victory or a defeat?

In presence of that gigantic Colossus, whose brutal heels have crushed growing nationalities, and whose giant steps have spanned 2500 miles into Europe, whose fleets ride triumphantly the Black Sea, and whose battlements frown terror upon Constantinople: —in presence of this Czar Nicholas, the most wily politician of the present age, who shall affirm that Turkey weakened, is Christianity and freedom strengthened, or civilisation reinforced? “History is continually repeating itself.” This strange jingle of Lavalette, Menschikoff, Rose de la Cour, Stratford de Redcliffe, is but a substitution for Zarik, Roderick, Amblessa, Eudes, Abderame, and Martel. The juggle of words, the jargon of mere phrases, momentarily usurps empire over the sword; and oh! Strange and significant moral, it is again the pretext of religious fanaticism; but this time the fanaticism of Christianity, which makes Constantinople the scene of its impious struggles, and which conducts its obscene wrestlings on the steps of the holy sepulchre. Constantinople, the metropolis of Mahometanism, the heart of the prophet’s faith, with its ventricles surcharged and stifled with the breath of Christian doctrinists! The temples of this religion of the sword, resounding with the clamour of diplomatists, the murmured prayers of these Mussulman devotees, broken in upon by the wordy brawlings of Christian controversy; strange spectacle! over which the crescent casts a pale ray, the last enfeebled beam of the glorious radiancy of the Ottoman empire. Yes, when Turkey surrendered the initiative of fanaticism, when she became the object—the battle-ground—of religious diplomacy, forgetting her promulgative mission, she proclaimed her own rapid abasement and her speedy fall.

And thus, sir, we see reform and toleration struggling with prejudices and blind fanaticism. The infatuated ruler of diversified races, seated in the palace of the dominant faithful, destroying the keenness of the edge of that flaming sword which placed him there. Surrounded by Bosnians and Wallachs, by Servians and Montenegrins, by all the hot-blooded belief of the children of the Greek Church, with half-revolted provinces, active and persevering enemies on his frontiers, exhausted treasuries, corrupt innovating ministers, the humbled descendant of the conquering Prophet perseveres in reform and toleration, and signs, in abject dismay, the shameful treaty dictated by the Russian power, under the walls of the second city of the Turkish Empire! Having broken the well-tempered Damascus blade of the true believer, having affirmed the worthless character of the dogmas on which the glory of the crescent was erected, the Sultan sees before him rebellious provinces and revolted dependencies, which even threaten to overturn the trembling throne itself. And the descendants of the prophet, armed no more in the panoply of their belief, forget to draw their impatient swords to avenge the divinity of their faith. The humiliated Sultan stretches his arms towards the West, invoking the aid of Christianity! And it is the sword of Christianity which raises the despised crescent, only that, despaired of even by its own followers, it may tremble rapidly to its proximate fall.

Sententious dogmatists, great statesmen, utterers of brilliant aphorisms, contemplate history inscribing your frailties upon the ever-enduring tablets of her marble records. “The balance of power,” that unfortunate sentence, which has cost England her hundreds of millions, and made bankrupts of great and powerful states, has hurled the world far back, centuries in arrear of her destined advancement. The infallibility of that principle has been screeched forth, when it has been the most infringed. Turkey, Poland, Italy, Russia, Spain, speak to its absurdity and to its impracticability. And now the people, pleased like children with a new toy, still unconvinced, ignorant of the strength and of the sources of weakness within nations, —unconscious of the pressure applied from without, dreaming of an equilibrium and self-abnegation, which are impossible, continue to hold up the battered doll of non-intervention, as the image which we must henceforth fall down before and reverently worship!

But, sir, this worship of principles has already cost us much: it threatens to cost us still more; and the object of my next letter will mainly be to indicate the unexpected and melancholy results that non-intervention has always hitherto produced, and to foreshadow, by this indication, what, if applied to our future policy, and especially to Turkey, will be its pernicious and fatal consequences.

ALPHA.

* * *