doomed to perish by the sword or by famine. The Duchesses of Alberg, Broglio, and De Caze; every Frenchwoman, distinguished by rank, riches, talent, or virtue, have divided the different quarters of Paris among them, and traverse on foot every street, and enter into every house, demanding the charity of their inhabitants for a nation of martyrs. From Denmark to Italy one great event enchains the attention of Europe; the rich and the poor, as they bring their offerings to the victims of oppression, pronounce the same imprecations upon the allies of their exterminators. Posterity will scarcely believe that England alone should have remained unmoved by the general feeling of commiseration; that she should neither have felt pity for so much suffering, nor admiration of so much heroism; and that she has contented herself with expressing her disapprobation of those among the Greeks whose excess of grief has converted itself into fury, and who have revenged by atrocities the murder of their sons, and the dishonour of their daughters.

But England is yet subject to a deeper reproach: she has not remained a silent spectator of this struggle even to death; she has lent her aid to the strong, and has withdrawn defenders from the weak. At the moment when ministers announced the success of their negociations, so fatal to Greece, I endeavoured, in a letter addressed to two daily newspapers, to prove that they ought not to leave their labours incomplete. I showed that by the conduct of the Russians, the Greeks have been so thoroughly compromised for the last half-century, that there has only remained to the Turks the choice of massacring them, or acknowledging their independence; that after the massacre of one million three hundred thousand Greeks, the Turks will be driven upon the destruction of four or five millions of Christians, established in other provinces of their empire; and that this massacre will continue for years, until England shall arrest it; that she alone has the power of doing so; that she can stop it in a single day, without incurring the slightest chance of thereby engaging herself in a new war.

Lastly, I showed that England has contracted an obligation to arrest the progress of these massacres, because it was she who removed from the Greeks the protection of the Russians, at the moment when the latter stepped forward to save them.

Let us figure to ourselves a vessel loaded with men, women, and children, carried along by a rapid torrent, and on the point of being swallowed up by the waves: if it sinks, though in the sight of spectators, not one of whom will expose himself to destruction in order to save it, the witnesses of the shipwreck may be accused of a want of heroism, without any charge of being guilty; but, if the same boat were attached to the bank by a cable, which served as her mooring, and if one of the bye-standers cuts this cable, then it is he who is the real murderer of all those whom the torrent swallows. His crime is in proportion to the number of victims of whose death he has been the cause, and to the extent of their sufferings. Greece was this vessel ready to perish-loaded with 1,300,000 souls: her safety-cable was the war with Russia; the British ministers in Russia and Turkey were the men ordered to cut it; and it is they who are henceforth responsible for the murder of a whole nation, and for the sufferings of its expiring moments.

After having shown with what a load of guilt England would charge herself if she suffered the Greeks to perish, I should have thought it an insult to inquire whether the crime would prove advantageous to her. I was recalled to the political question; I was called on to show how England could save the Greeks from massacre, without augmenting, in the same proportion, the influence of Russia. I was told that such a thing might be offered to the consideration of some new Don Quixote, but not to that of a statesman. Let us reflect a moment, however, on this reasoning. Because the Greeks may one

* See the Representative of June 1. The Times, which had my letter first, announced it two days successively, but did not publish it.

+ See the King's speech on the dissolution of Parliament.

day become the allies or the subjects of Russia, are they therefore to be mercilessly slain? I should blush to ascribe such reasoning to any government: but I am called upon to reply to it, and my task will not be difficult.

The Greeks, who have solemnly proposed to place themselves under the protection of England, and who have been repulsed by her with contempt, are only the allies of Russia because they are reduced to despair. Let their condition become supportable, let it be happy, and the Russians will be the last among all the nations in the world with whom the Greeks will dream of forming an alliance. The Russians have betrayed the Greeks in all their preceding wars they betray them now; and they will still continue to betray whatever people may replace the Greeks in Greece. Yet as long as the subjects of Turkey are subject to all the spoliations, the ignominy, and the sufferings which overwhelm the Rayas, they will take arms for all the enemies of the Porte, because war leaves some chances, and slavery none; because a war at least satisfies a natural passion-vengeance for the most mortal of offences; and passion does not calculate well. But as soon as the Greeks have succeeded in shaking off a yoke so odious, they will see too clearly the danger of an alliance with Russia, to allow it for a moment to seduce them. Greece forms the meridional point of Turkey in Europe, which Russia is attacking from the north. The Russians then, cannot enter Greece till they have traversed as conquerors Moldavia, Wallachia, Bulgaria, Romelia, Macedonia, and Thessaly; and even then they would be perpetually exposed to be attacked in flank by the Turks of Asia. Moreover, the country which separates the banks of the Dniester from Greece, is intersected by chains of transverse mountains, into which an army could never hope to enter without abandoning its cannon, and endangering the failure of provisions. The more a country is poor, barbarous, wild, and unprovided with broad and open roads, the more necessary it is, in attacking it, to choose some line of military operations which shall not remove the army either from the principal rivers, nor from its baggage, to follow the natural basins formed by the mountains, instead of attempting to cross their chains the one after the other. Turkey in Europe is so difficult to cross, that, in attacking the Porte, the Russians have never made, and never will accomplish, their junction with the Greeks; but they have always required the latter to keep up a diversion on the frontier the farthest removed from themselves, and to expose themselves (for the Russians) to the utmost danger without having the least chance of being directly assisted. Inasmuch as the perils which the Greeks were required to brave for the sake of the Russians were terrible, and sufficient to rebut any people whose situation was not altogether desperate, insomuch the recompense which is promised them as the fruit of their labours is ill calculated to tempt a free and industrious nation. The Russians are the slaves of a Christian prince; the Greeks, of a Mussulman; and such is the horrible situation of the latter, that they would even be contented to change their servitude. But certainly the government of independent Greece must be truly execrable, if the Greeks did not prefer it to the Russian yoke. They must know quite well, that if their freedom is once recognised, the destruction of the Ottoman empire must expose them to fall under the dominion of Muscovite tyrants. At present they have no other desire than the annihilation of the Porte: but if Europe rendered to Greece her independence, she would have nothing more at heart than the prolongation of the existence of the Turkish empire, which would separate her from the Russians.

That existence, it is true, cannot last very long. We must be blind not to perceive that the Turkish empire has received its death-blow; and that, whatever may be the issue of the present struggle, all these beautiful provinces are destined one day to become the spoil of the Russians, unless we can render to the Greeks a government which shall create new strength and new resources, and which shall enable them to defend themselves. All the Turkish cities are falling into ruin, the commerce of the whole empire is fast decaying, its population is decreasing, its finances are exhausted, its armies are destitute of valour,

and undisciplined. If the Turks succeed in exterminating the Greek population, they will at the same time lose their whole navy, which is now entirely formed of the Greek islanders: they will lose the tribute of a rich province; they will sacrifice the industry of the men who possess the most activity throughout their empire, and they will never replace the subjects whom they shall destroy. For oppression is so wasting in Turkey that its population falls off every year ; and it must diminish in a still greater proportion, when a decreased number of persons paying taxes is called upon to pay the same contributions: it follows that every year the extortions will become more intolerable. If a new race of people is introduced into Greece, they must infallibly become the enemies of the Porte, because the Turks know only that kind of government which is founded on slavery and oppression, and they will always urge those whom they despoil and persecute to revolt against them. While the population is diminishing in Turkey, while it remains stationary in Austria, it is doubling in Russia in less than every half-century.

This disproportion of strength between the Russians and Turks is therefore increasing yearly, and it must become speedily irresistible. If the peace which foreign powers are now exerting themselves to maintain in the Levant, and to which they are making the sacrifice of a whole nation, lasts half a century longer, the Russian provinces on the borders of the Black Sea, which one hundred years ago were almost deserts, will contain a population so numerous and so warlike, that all the armed force of Europe will not avail to prevent it from seizing upon the vast plains of European Turkey, which the atrocious government of the Porte will have during that time altogether depopulated. There is certainly no need of a recurrence to subtle principles in politics to enable us to comprehend, that if we wish to prevent a country from being conquered by powerful neighbours, we should augment the ratio of its strength, not its weakness; we should know, that by maintaining over it a detestable government, we weaken it daily; that if this government is at war with its subjects, and has no other policy than to exterminate them, every one of its successes renders its fall more inevitable. There is no want of facts to confirm a theory so simple. Wallachia, Moldavia, Bulgaria, and Servia, have been carefully kept under the yoke of the Porte, which has been aggravated by the tributary, ruinous, and venal government of the Hospodars. These provinces, which are always ripe for revolt against the Turks, weaken their power, and open the gates of their empire to the Russians; whereas, had they allowed the inhabitants of these provinces to choose for themselves an equitable and protecting government, the number and riches of the population of those countries-perhaps the most fertile in the world, and the best fitted for commerce-would have increased rapidly; the borders of the Dniester and the Pruth, and the Danube, would have been covered with fortresses; the militia of the country would have been all eager to defend it, and the provinces which must now necessarily fall without resistance into the power of the Russians, if they had been left to themselves, and permitted to become powerful by means of their own exertions, could never have been conquered.

It is still time to renounce a policy as erroneous as it is cruel, and as dangerous as it is impious: it is time to save the independence of the Levant, not by allowing its inhabitants to be massacred, but by endeavouring, on the contrary, to augment their numbers, their resources, their energies, their happiness, and their desire to defend that happiness. It is time to detach all the subjects of Turkey from a Russian alliance, by giving them a country to fight for, and an interest in it parallel to Europe. The question is in fact now become interesting to all Europe, and all Christendom is called upon to decide it in favour of its honour, outraged by the Turks; of its repose, which a criminal policy compromises; of the balance of power, which the emancipation of the Greeks can alone confirm.

The Turks, in fact, in determining upon the extermination of the Greek nation, proposed not only the destruction of the allies of the Franks living

among them, but wished thus to testify their contempt for the Franks themselves. Humiliated as they have recently been by the Christian powers, they take their revenge upon them by committing what they regard as a mortal insult; for they have always distinguished nations by their religion, and not by their government. They have always confounded all Christians in one common mass. As they could never believe that Christians would voluntarily give up to destruction a nation of Christians, they persuade themselves that they make all Europe tremble, and that each Greek who is delivered to slaughter adds at once to their triumph, and to the abasement of the powers of Christendom.

In the same proportion as the Turks propose to outrage the English, the French, the Germans, and the Russians, by slaying under their eyes their brothers in Christ Jesus, in that proportion must the nations of Europe feel themselves insulted by the cruelties of the Mussulmans. The land the most dear to our recollections-the descendants of our instructors in all the arts and in all the sciences-are given up to calamities unparalleled in history. The number of victims, the atrocity of their sufferings, the heroism they have displayed in their last moments, are all calculated to excite in the highest degree our horror, our pity, and our admiration. Champions from Germany, England, France, and Italy, combat in the Greek armies, and thus represent in some measure their nations, involved in these horrible tragedies; the journals which are daily printed in every language, and which circulate even through the remotest village, announce to astonished Europe all the details of these terrible sacrifices. Every where committees are formed in behalf of the Greeks -everywhere subscriptions are received-and every citizen, in devoting to their cause his offering, may be said in some measure to vote for the regeneration of Greece.

Can it be believed, that when opinion is so strongly pronounced as it has been on the Continent, and when it is at the same time in accordance with every principle both of morals and policy,-can it be believed that there is no danger in neglecting or despising it? Nations will learn that England, while she boasts of the missions which she sends forth to the extremities of the globe to convert the Heathen to Christianity, actually subscribes to the massacre of many millions of Christians in Turkey, and to the expulsion of the religion of Christ from all the States of the Grand Signor; they will learn that France, while she abolishes the liberty of the Gallican Church, while she recalls the Jesuits, while she demands tokens of the confessional from her public functionaries, furnishes the arsenals, the fleets, and the armies of the Pacha of Egypt, that he may massacre more martyrs than ever perished in the four first centuries of the Church; they will learn that all the governments of Europe in concert, propose to accomplish an object the most contrary possible to the wishes of the people of Europe; that they trample under foot pity, honour, and the interests of Christianity, with the single intention of confirming their power; that no credit can be given to their promises; and that the religion of which they pretend to be the defenders, is with them only a criminal hypocrisy. Certainly, however strong governments may be, they are not yet strong enough thus to reveal all their baseness without danger. They will be yet weaker if the crime which they meditate is accomplished. They count on establishing in the Levant the peace of the grave; but to succeed in this there must be at least two years of massacre and scenes of horror. During this time Europe will be gradually filling with fugitives, who will repeat these terrible details even in the most obscure and remote cottages: these details will constantly augment the hatred of the people against all existing governments, and that hatred will at length produce a terrible explosion, which will wrap them in its blaze and avenge their crimes. The preservation of social order in Europe requires the independence of Greece; for the extermination of the Greeks will be closely followed by the extermination of those governments whieh have favoured the crime. The balance of power demands the independence of Greece, because the Greeks

in slavery invite the Russians; but free, they would repel them. The safety of the Turkish Empire requires the independence of Greece, because Greece revolted weakens the Ottoman armies; emancipated, she would strengthen them. The prosperity of commerce and industry requires the independence of Greece; for the same country, of which all the riches are at present destroyed by robbery, when it begins to prosper under a protecting government, would attract to itself, by rich exchanges, the produce of all the universe. If you wish nations to be tranquil, make them happy. This maxim, which policy ought to borrow from morals, is so easily comprehet:ded, that it makes a writer blush to have to develope it. Cease to render life insupportable to the Greeks, as it has been for two centuries, and they will no longer call upon other nations to be their deliverers. Cease to favour their extermination, which you have done for five years, and their cries will no longer disturb your repose. Cease to outrage humanity, religion, and the wishes of your subjects, and public opinion will no longer invoke avengers to deliver the worid from your tyranny. But be assured, on the contrary, that the longer you pursue your execrable policy, the more will you be heaping burning coals upon your heads. If you consent to the extermination of the Greeks, you must very speedily consent to the extermination of the Macedonians, the Bulgarians, the Servians, and the people of Monte Negro: but each of these crimes will prolong the fury of the Levant, and augment the fermentation in the minds of your own people: every new crime will enfeeble the Turkish power, increase the preponderance of the Russians, and render more inevitable the catastrophe which you seek to avoid. You will perish then, but you will perish with shame and with guilt; whereas, by now listening to the voice of religion and humanity, you will save yourselves in saving Greece, and you will confirm, as far as it depends on you, the peace of all Europe, and the balance of power in the West.

NOTES ON THE MONTH.

WEBER.-On occasion of the death of this composer, the proprietors of Covent Garden issued a notice that," anxious to give his survivors, (that is to say, all the rest of this breathing world) the advantage of the benefit intended for Weber, his last Opera of Oberon should be performed on Saturday June 17." This notice is abundantly absurd-but we quote it less for the sake of amusing our readers, than of expressing our regret, that the house was not by any means full; so that Weber's wife and family, who are evidently meant by the singular phrase of "his survivors," we fear will have gained nothing by the exhibition. The fact is, that Weber was greatly overrated before his arrival in this country, and he was as undeservedly greatly under-rated before his death in it: people, however unreasonably, always expect a man of talent in all cases to surpass his last work, and if he falls below the level of his first, the disappointment is proportionate, and the recoil certain and powerful. The Oberon of Weber turned out a signal failure, and was, after a few unsuccessful repetitions, withdrawn from the stage. The music was found to be common-place in the extreme-as insufferable as Bishop's worst, or Braham's best. Even the Freischütz was a secondary opera, and utterly unworthy to be ranked in the same class with even the middling operas of Rossini, to say nothing of the loftier efforts of his muse. As to Oberon, it is just as much beneath even Weber's secondary operas, as they are inferior to the Freischütz. This gradation of failures has given rise to numerous stories, and among the rest, to a report that Weber did not compose, but bought that great musical work of the real author. We merely allude to this story as one of the on dits of the day, or rather of the month: for the supposition is preposterous. If the Freischütz had really been the first work of some unknown master, we should soon have had another from