THE RUMPLING - OF DESPOTISM.
1 Adam Street, Adelphi,17th September 1855. Sin—Sebastopol is ours; the robber fortress is no longer the stronghold of the ruffian. The preparations of years for the conquest of the East are strip- ped away from him, and the remnant of his serf-soldiery must retreat into his howling wilderness, or surrender, or be slain. The cause of despotism has been tried in the balance of its own especial element—brute force—and found wanting. The wedge is entered into the Northern autocracy, and yet a little while and it will crumble to its base. It is our business to hurry the process; and the very habit of mere power-worship in which the bar- barians have lived, will more readily bring them into obedience to those who now hold the masterdom, till new thoughts, feelings, and aspirations, shall arise, in conformity with modern civilization, in which man is an individual as well as a unit.
The Crimea belongs to the Allies; but of course we may expect the usual Rostopchination, the dogged vengeance of destruction. Simphero.pol and other towns will be burnt and blown up, to the detriment of their inhabit- ants ; and so ends the vaunt of Menschikoff and the staged Jezebels who "painted their faces and tyred their heads" to look out upon the expected rout of the Alma and the noyade of the Allies in the waters of the Euxme. Of a verity "the Lord bath delivered them into our hands," and "the dogs have licked blood" to their fill.
The Crimea is practically ours; and our business now is to convert it into a comraercial colony, that will eat on all sides into the vitals of the despotic system ; tempting away the best of the Russian subjects; appropriating the waters of the Sea of Azof, the mouths of the Don and Dneister, and the course of the Danube, to its civilizing purposes; bringing the barbarous tribes into close contact with Western progress, and teaching them the broad distinction between that and selfish Russian cruelty ; thus leaving to the Russian power no scope save sharing in the commerce for their own gains in revenue, or the alternative of a huge system of smuggling, either choice being a practical limitation of lawless force. It is painful, but we must perforce "be cruel, only to be kind." The wealthy cities that back up force and fraud must be taught that those who are not for progress are against it, and must share in the destruction of the tyranny they uphold. Odessa must share the fate destined for the fortresses on the Danube's bank, unless she agrees to strip herself of all military men and military appliances. The moving water-forts are now as the eagle to the dovecote for every city that has six feet of navigable water within four miles' range, and new experiments will probably increase the range to six miles. Only by dwelling in caverns beneath mounds of earth can men on shore avoid the modern missiles of destruction, and with the convic- tion that they may as well shoot at the edge of the East wind as try to strike their birdlike antagonist hovering pn the horizon and never for an in- stant in the same spot. Odessa and the surrounding towns must share the fate of Sweaborg ; Revel and the towns of the Baltic be swept away ; and even if the forts of Cronstadt cannot yet be damaged, it is evident that the dwellings and the shipping can be destroyed by fire-rockets, unless they con- struct them of iron—a difficult thing under present circumstances. With her seaboard towns destroyed, and her soldiery dwelling in holes like rats, poverty overspreading the land, her ruling races shut out from travel, and but a small force of the Allies patrolling the waters, Russia must sink back to utter and entire barbarism, save the outer fringe of her people, who may come in contact with her enemies commercially ; and meanwhile we may go on appropriating as much of her outer territory as we desire for the pur- pose of building up other and antagonistic nations, to curb her and hold her in, till that civilization shall creep inwards upon her, which she has failed to generate and radiate from her central capital.
And next comes the question of Austria—a despotism quite as mischievous and fax more cowardly. The business of the Allies is to effect her humiliation before the eyes of Germany. Her troops will be ordered out of the Danu- bian Principalities, where they have shown their accustomed insolence; and the corn-producing countries should be made really independent, and opened to free commerce. And, without consulting any Continental power, France and England may insist on the free navigation of the Danube' as a material guarantee for increasing progress and decreasing despotism. This, and free trade with Italy, may induce the Allies not to send their ship into the Italian ports as they return from the Euxine—not to increase the territory of the King of Sardinia by annexing the Austrian provinces, on one of the most righteous pleas that ancient or modern history can furnish—saving an oppressed people from the grasp of cruelty, removing a stigma from Europe, and putting a veto on Austrian covetousness, which was only prevented from absorbing Rome by the French pawn put on the chessboard by Louis Napoleon. The time has come to end the world's great antagonism by the destruction of despotism ; and if this be not done now, the fight will again commence at a future time, and that will be accomplished by violence, which under the halo of victory we can now bring about peaceably. - To turn to " E. A. F. I am glad to find that he denounce all tyranny, Russian or other ; but he can hardly expect the Allies to be se simple as to stand by white Russia completes her work of absorption or annexation, under arms, awaiting the final attack on ourselves prior to our conversion into an outlying province of serf gun-makers. We do not war with Russia per se but with the irresponsible system of cold selfish despotism, at the head of which stands the Russian Government ; a system that would make of mankind, at best, a race of sybarite slaves—at worst, a race of banditti licensed by tyrant-made law—in most cases, a race like that of China, a compound of the sybarite and the bandit. The systems of Russian and Chinese go- vernment are identical, save in one particular : they both press all the in- tellect of the community into the service of the despotism, forcing that in- tellect to work in one direction only ; but the Russian admits foreign intel- lect, which the Chinese excludes. The Chinese Tartar holds himself up_its a god and a father to his people, and the Ruffian Tartar does the BM& The Chinese despotism has ended in an effete people, with traditions of dragon- shielded warriors and doubled-sworded men, and practical pirates on their seaboard ; and the Russian people, as seen in their soldiery, are but as the troops of a satrap. Cannot E. A. F. see that the modern Englishman and Prink are the real growth of what was good in the elder Greeks, and that they are really fighting the battle for whatever may be left of freedom in the modern Greeks, against a modern Xerxes? The despotism of Turkey is practically at an end—the mystery is dissolved, and men talk of the Pa- dis'hah as familiarly as of Paddy.
E. A. F. says he "cannot always translate my language." Were I a word-monger, I might allege that his "classic dreaming" obscured his faculties: but I think language—in opposition to Talleyrand—should express a man's meaning ; and an Englishman's meaning, so far as possible, in plain English—but, not necessarily emotionless. I have a high reverence) for classic learning, and also for the scholar—not the mere pedant, but the scholar imbued with the spirit of his learning. The history of language is the history of the human mind. A noble language belongs to a noble race, and the heroic in the high sense of the word is the only thing really perma- nent in humanity. Religion, devotion courage, self-abnegation are all comprised in the word, which belongs to Greek and Christian alild—Cheie- tian—not modern Greek-Fetish. We reverence a noble language, as we rever- ence a noble race or family, for the grandeur it has set forth to the world; but in like proportion must be our contempt for those who boast of their inherited name without the qualities that first ennobled the name.
"Not thus, but far otherwise, reasons the great heart of humanity, through the many brains it quickens with its gushing tides." The heart is the centre of pulsation, which drives the blood through the whole system of circulation ; and the action of the brain depends on this circulation. A small weak heart does not stimulate the brain ; and people so constituted need wins and alcohol, as is the case with Russian soldiers; and was the case with Byron when he resorted to gin-and-water—and even he tells UB somewhere, there is no reasoner like the heart." " Cold-hearted " is an
epithet of contempt. "Great-heart" is one of the heroes of John Bunyan. Othello was "great of heart," and so was young Talbot : and what is the meaning of our word " courage " "What thou had to do do it with all
thy heart, or might." Cor-agere, to do with the heart. -Tile brain without the heart makes an Iago ; the heart with too little brain makes an Othello.
Great heart and brain together make a Hampden ; of whom, I think, Cla- rendon says that "lie had the heart to conceive, the head to contrive, and the hand to execute, any kind of mischief whatever,"—meaning by '.mischief," opposition to despotism. The library of E. A. F. will correct my methory-quotation if I em wrong. The heart has its original impulse from the Creator, and hearts beat in unison like one "great heart of humanity"; and "the gushing tides" sti- mulate the brains, and the tongues give forth as with one accent the "vox Populi vox Dei,' and the mere rhetor becomes a prophet. The sentence E. A. F. cannot understand is not even an image, but a physical and mental fact ; and bad he read it by the aid of his heart, and not by his logic and his books, he could not well have misunderstood it. The Russians fight, not by heart, but by fear of the stick and knout ; they have no "vex Popuh" ; and their Creator—their Czar, or Ciesar, or Emperor—is a Moloch and not a god. I apprehend E. A. F. will not far disagree with me in the main. He wishes the Turkish despotism to be first overthrown. I incline to think that the destruction of Russian despotism is the all-important matter, in whose train other despotisms will follow. Therefore, till the Russian people are competent to civilization, we must continue to repress and humble them, and cease to recognize Russia as an European power. The process will be a salutary one for them if they possess the qualities out of which a civilized nation can be formed. B. A. F. quotes Turkey,. Spain, and France, as having been in turn the bugbears of Europe, and falling by their own rottenness. He should have said, by their own despotisms. France was rescued by her revolution, and Turkey revived by the overthrow of her janissaries; and the Spanish intel- lect will be found quick as ever when the despotic incubus is removed. Free countries, in which men of all nations can settle at will, are ever the most prosperous : England and America to wit. Modern Greek jealousy of foreigners is an inherited defect from the same sources as their classical intestine wars, when small states wasted in mutual opposition the strength which should have resisted the Roman as it did the Persian, ere they fell down a weakened prey to the ferocious Mohammedan conqueror, to be de- voured in turn by the Russ, had not the Western chivalry of modern times interfered.
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