PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY 322 382 384 TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. An extra copy of THE LIVING AGE is sent gratis to any one getting up a club of Five New Subscribers. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & GAY. Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. Hush hush! The moonbeams fall Shut close thine eyes, For the last streak of daylight dies. Hush! hush! The day is done. Sweet peace upon thy pillow lies. Hush! hush! And happy dreams For angels sing thy lullabies. From The Contemporary Review. TURKEY. "WE are the best police of the Bosphorus." The words were spoken with emphasis, as a triumphant and conclusive argument. Nothing more could be required by a foreign visitor to justify the Ottoman rule in Constantinople. The speaker had been a medical student in Paris. His metaphors were made up of the jargon of the hospital. To this allpowerful grand vizier of Sultan Abd-ulAssiz, it was a stroke of luck that the tsar in nicknaming his country should have called it “Sick Man." Fuad Pasha felt doubly at home in talking of his master's empire as a patient. "If you wish to have news of our health," he continued, "it is not advisable to consult that doctor." 66 'I know Turkey better than he [the tsar], and than any one. I have stethoscoped (auscultée) it back and front. There is no organic malady, but-pardonnez-moi we have the itch and no sulphur at hand.” If Fuad Pasha (whose disciple is now in authority) had an ideal system of government, it was that which a man far greater than he, but with a mind of similar tendencies, had expounded in "Les Idées Napoléoniennes." To reconstruct the caliphate, to reform it into a liberal despotism seated upon the heads of a dumb democracy, this was the thought of the great minister, with whose death is supposed to have departed the glory of the reign of Abd-ul-Assiz. The recent revolution is explained as a reversion to the policy of Fuad. Midhat Pasha is hailed as the political heir of the ex-medical student of Paris.. The new advisers of the new sultan will do their best to sustain the opinion, which no doubt they hold, that Turkey is not sick unto death, that, as Fuad said, she has no organic malady. The present writer maintains a contrary opinion, and it is the object of these pages to show that the Turkish empire has organic disease, and that her incurable malady grows ever more deadly as she is forced by new arterial connections, closer and more closely, into the light of the political ideas and civilization of western Europe. I shall reduce the pleas for the maintenance of the Turkish empire to that one plea of expediency upon which the greatest master of Turk ish policy, Fuad Pasha, was content to rest its claim "We are the best police of the Bosphorus "—and I shall show that the validity of this plea is a reproachful testimony to greed and jealousy, and want of true civilization, on the part of the great powers of Europe. The Turkish power is a Mahommedan theocracy. No law is popularly accepted as valid unless it has religious sanction. The statute-book must run with the Koran. The fetva of the Sheik-ul-Islam was needed before any could engage in the dethronement of Abd-ul-Assiz. But we have seen in the history of the empire that the outward manifestation of this theocratic basis can be suppressed wherever it is likely to be offensive. The co-ordinate authority which the queen of these realms exercises, by virtue of the Capitulations of 1675, over all who can be called British subjects in Turkey, was "the command" (I quote the words of the treaty) "of the Emperor and Conqueror of the Earth, achieved with the assistance of the Omnipotent and by the especial Grace of God, We who by Divine Grace, assist ance, will, and benevolence, now are the King of Kings of the world, the Prince of Emperors of every age, the Dispenser of Crowns to Monarchs, and the Champion." In less than two hundred years a great change was observed in the outward manifestation of the basis of Turkish power in Europe. In the Treaty of 1856 there is no trace of divine authority about the attributes of the sultan. He is styled simply "emperor of the Ottomans." This was the work of A'ali and Fuad, the great exemplars of the present time. It is not a final condemnation of the Turkish power to say that it is theocratic, for this has been the pretence of all powers, and is still the reputed basis of most of the powers of Europe. In his own dominions, the tsar is just as much "the shadow of God" as the sultan. We must look to the ethics of the religion which is the groundwork of power. Mere forms of speech can be changed, and the language of Paris put into the mouth of the padi ed; by walking out of doors in veils which prevent every breath of fresh air; in shoes and upon stones which render exercise a torture, and graceful carriage an impossibility; by a life of inanity, ignorance, and indulgence in unwholesome food. The error is not uncommon nor its cause recondite. Our mistake is that of the dramatists of the Restoration, who, Lord Macaulay says, knew not that "drapery was more alluring than exposure." The mystery of the East is our delusion, and this, if we face it closely and fairly, especially if we regard it during moments when in the political struggle its veil is disarranged, is, as we shall see, a cover for evils which prefer darkness rather than light, in social life; a despotism with slavery for a domestic institution, and upon the throne of European Turkey, a misrepresentation founded upon force, upheld by oppression of those beneath it, and by the jealousies of the powers which are entitled its protectors. shah. Had I been blind I could have fan- | ens, as well as the sight of man is excludcied myself at the Tuileries on the roth May, 1868, when, amid hopes not less extravagant than those which now encircle the utterances of Murad V., his illfated predecessor announced the establishment of the Council of State and of the High Court of Justice. He, the successor of sultans whose pretensions to divine direction had not been less declared than those of the infallible pope, he, who was, in fact, the pope of the Sooni Mahommedans, confessed that something was wrong, something rotten in his state, because, said the master of greedy pashas, from his throne in the Sublime Porte, "if the principles and laws already established had answered to the exigencies of our country and of our people, we ought to have found ourselves to-day in the same rank as the most civilized and best-administered states of Europe." With this naïve admission of failure, and "with a view to promote the rights of his subjects," Abd-ul-Assiz, the reformer, pronounced the establishment of the Council of State "whose members are taken from all classes of our subjects without exception." "Another body," he continued, "instituted under the name of the High Court of Justice, has been charged to assure justice to our subjects in that which concerns the security of their persons, their honor, and their property." The Turkish government has ceased to represent itself to foreign powers as theocratic,' but regarding its subjects this is its truest title. When in 1856 the sultan appeared, as we have seen, to throw off, in deference to his Christian protectors of the Latin and Anglican Churches, the assumption of divine authority, it was in fact asserted, though in language purely No Christian could speak more fairly. mundane. He is "emperor of the OttoMen talked and wrote of Abd-ul-Assiz as mans," i.e., of the Othmans, of the followthey now write and talk of Murad, and ers of the conqueror, whose sword Murad assumed then as now, that a man whose has girded on in the mosque of Ey-yub, youth had passed under oppression and the leader in fact of three millions out of surveillance, to whom education had been twelve millions of people, supreme ruler denied as dangerous, upon whom conti- by no other right than that of possession, nence and frugality had been enforced, as successor of Mahommed in the caliphwould, when he acquired unlimited power ate, and of Othman in the empire. Two and wealth, when he could indulge un- facts exhibit this most clearly: the Machecked the favorite weaknesses of the hommedan is to the Christian population Prophet, be a lover of liberty and law, a in European Turkey as one to three; but wise and liberal statesman, the husband the non-Mahommedan people are excluded of one wife, the master of no slaves, and from the army (nominally of seven hunin his private expenditure, the delight of dred thousand men) by which the sultan's anxious bondholders. It is the inveterate power is maintained. We have seen the error of the West to suppose that in Tur- opposite of divine right, that of human key figs grow from thistles that beauti-representation, propounded in the lanful women are produced by a life in rooms guage of the Tuileries. In its initiation, from which the glorious eye of the heav- the Council of State was a scandal, and in not overstate the case. Referring to the existence it has been a means of further | take his remarks upon this neglect, be- of the Sublime Porte. (a.) There were to be mixed tribunals of justice, codification of the law, translations of the codes into the different languages of the empire, settled modes of procedure: this has been translated as we have seen into mock courts, unpaid judges, arbitrary procedure, and corrupt decisions. (b.) Farming the revenue was to be abolished, and a sounder fiscal system established: nothing of the kind has been done. (c.) A solemn undertaking. was ruption: at present the whole administration entered into to grapple with the evils of coris corrupt. (d) Banks were to be established to assist agriculture and come to the aid of commerce: nothing of the sort has been thought of. (e.) Roads, canals, and railroads, were to be pushed forward with vigor, so as to open up the resources of the country: the absence of roads and canals has prevented the relief of a famished population; and as to railroads, the only important line finished was (f.). a cloak for a most notorious scandal. Foreign capital was to be invited and encouraged by every means, so as to develop the great resources of the country: such vexatious obstructions have been placed in the way of foreign capital that it has shunned the country, and men of integrity like Scott Russell and T. Brassey have had all their offers rejected; unless the pashas catch a glimpse of backshish, foreign enterprise is an abomination in their eyes. (g.) Christians were to be admitted into the army on the principle of general equality: nothing of the sort has The government of Turkey is undoubtedly Mahommedan, and the line of our argument leads us now to inquire, What are the inalienable essentials of Mahommedanism? what is its capacity for change, for reinterpretation, in accordance with modern ideas? The position of the Turkish government, thus representing only one-fourth of the people in the European empire, and claiming sovereignty over other millions in Servia and Roumania, who have successfully repudiated any direct interference by the sultan in their government, is that of a foreign garrison, the soldiery having no connection with the mass of the people. This government and garrison cohere by force of religious ties. Both are Mahommedan. It was long ago admitted by powerful friends of Turkey, that is to say, by the governments of England, France, and Italy, that the only safe path for the empire in the future was by annihi- These promises are, in all important lation of this exclusive mode of govern- | points, identical with those made, or to be ment; and it was A'ali Pasha, who, in the made, by Murad V. Midhat Pasha is famous Hatt-y-Humaioun, promised the overthrow of the Mahommedan system. To make this assurance more certain he consented, on behalf of his master, that the contracting powers of 1856 should be made parties to the execution of this hatt, by a special reference to it in the ninth article of the treaty. Of the thirty-five articles of this Hatt-y-Humaioun, the most interesting, and from our point of view the only important articles, have, as Mr. ButlerJohnstone, a friend to the Turkish power, writes, "remained dead letters." We will taken place. prepared to follow his great predecessors 1 |