A PROPHECY BY KINGSLEY. [To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR-1
SIR,—May I draw your attention to the following prophetic extract from the writings of Charles Kingsley P The words occur in the preface to some lectures delivered at the Philo- sophical Institution, Edinburgh, in February 1854, at the commencement of the Crimean War :— " As for the regeneration of Turkey, it is a question whether the regeneration of any nation which has sunk, not into mere valiant savagery, but into effete and profligate luxury, is possible. . . . For what can be done with a people which has lost the ono great quality which was the tenure of its existence, its military skill ? . . . 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, as it will come soon, to Turkey."
Later, in the first lecture, we read bow "Poor Diodorus went home, took pen and ink, wrote a treatise on the awful nothing, and died in despair, leaving five dialectical daughters' behind him, to be thorns in the side of some five hapless men of Macedonia as emancipated women,' a class but too common in the late days of Greece, as they will always be, perhaps, in civilizations which are decaying and crumbling to pieces, leaving their members to seek in bewilderment what they are and what bonds connect them with their fellow-beings."
The fall of Adrianople is reminiscent of the wisdom of Kingsley, and truly we have suffered much of recent times at the hands of the "Daughters of Diodorus."—I am, Sir, &c., G. M. 3L
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