THE EASTERN QUESTION.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " EPECTATOR.1
SIR,—After the admirable letters published by the Daily News from time to time from its correspondent in Bulgaria, can the English people hesitate any longer in throwing off all allegiance to a Government, which insists that England, in spite of the ex- pressed protest of her people, shall still remain porter of hell's gate, and cat's-paw for the Devil P I myself was two years in Turkish provinces, and present in the Lebanon village when the outbreak occurred that led afterwards to those terrible Syrian massacres ; so I have for a long time known something of Turkish misgovernment. Now every Englishman may know it, if he chooses. It stares him in the face ; and every Englishman is responsible, seeing that he pays taxes to prop up the palsied Turk. Unscrupulous journalism may throw dust in our eyes, by pointing to certain severities alleged to have been practised by Russia in conquering a fierce horde of Turkistan. And we may profitably remember what excesses English, as well as French and American, soldiers have committed in bygone wars. But how these reflections can be held to prove that it is civilised, Protestant, moral (?) England's sacred duty to keep flow- ing that perennial fountain of abomination called Turkey, till all the world's fairest provinces are devastated and decimated for ever, reconquered by wild beasts and desert sand, from whose sway toiling generations slowly won them, because, forsooth, Russia would aid England in stanching the foul flood,—this, indeed, only a Pall Mall Gazette or a Lord Beaconsfield may comprehend.
A dominant nation, which is among nations what a criminal lunatic like Nero, De Retz, De Sade, or Thomassen is among individuals,—such a nation is at large ; and Russia, whose near relations the monster now happens to be outraging, under cir- cumstances of unimaginable horror, proposes to arrest its mur- derous and obscene progress. Well, say Lord Beaconsfield and his Tories, England must fight with Russia to the death ! For England having taken this pleasant creature under her own especial protec- tion—facetiously binding it with gossamer promises, which it has amused itself ever since by breaking—shall the Anglo-Mussulman Frankenstein be forbidden, at its own sweet will, to whore, to torture, and to slay all or any of Russia's own sisters, with such ingenious refinements of lustful cruelty as its diabolic blood- madness may suggest ? No, perish the human race, but leave us our Ruesophobia! Now, of the Christian religion we need not here speak. That unpractical thing all politicians, whether Jew, Mussulman, or Christian, may agree to leave upon the shelf. But, Sir, in the name of all the most elementary principles of right and wrong, known alike to Hebrew, Boman, or Greek, is not this too glaring an iniquity for gods and men—of whatsoever persuasion—to permit ? If our revenues, and our hold upon India are to be preserved only by thrusting opium upon China, and Turkish hordes upon Europe, many of us will cry, " Let them go !" for history proclaims that neither nations nor persons are suffered long to batten with im- punity upon the spoils of injustice. But our hold upon India depends upon no atrocity of the kind ; and this the Spectator has already proved. We ought long ago to have joined Russia in sweeping this offscouring of humanity into the dust-heap of rotten empires. Our present duty, all jesting Pilates notwithstanding, is to join her in securing such real (not nominal) autonomy for the Christian races under Turkey as may seem to sincere practical men most attainable ; so may we hope to regain some of that moral influence in Europe, which by our selfish and double policy we have forfeited. Whether or not Crusades were justifiable of old, they are imperative now.—I am, Sir, &c., Maybury, Woking Station, November 28. RODEN NOEL.
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