A friend who views the world of action "through the
loopholes of re- treat" gives us the impressions made upon an impartial mind by the reading of the latest newspapers on the Turkish question. "The Four Powers have erred in treating Turkey and Russia on perfectly equal terms ; whereas the rights in question were those of Turkey, and Rus- sia appears in the matter simply in the light of an aggressor, and a violator of the Turkish dominion and of European law. If European law is only to be enforced against weak nations, and the strong are to be menage and flat- tered into complying with its requirements, the sooner we proclaim the whole system effete, the better ; for then no one would trust to it, and no one would be deceived. The state of nature, as old Hobbes would call that state in which might is right and the law is simply the will of the strongest,
is tolerabitrif only we know beforehand that that is the system to which life has to be accommodated. But to have all this apparatus of standing armies and elaborate floating cities, and a complicated machinery of diplomacy be- sides, and after all to find the result simply what it would have been with- out— "'That he should take who has the power, And he should keep who can '— is bitter humiliation and disappointment."
Previous page
