Thomas Carlyle

“ It has always been the artful endeavour of the Czar to place his opponents at a disadvantage, by bringing them at each step into a position in which they shall appear aggressors. He crosses the Pruth, professing not to declare war thereby, but merely to take a precautionary pledge for the fulfilment of treaties. And because Turkey justly regarded his act as a declaration of war, he calls Turkey the aggressor. He insists on fighting out with Turkey alone a quarrel in which all European powers have, by his acts, become interested. ”

“ The Christian Church has, as a Church, no possession on earth. Rights of property belong to Christian men, not as Christians, but as men. The Jew, not the Christian, forfeited Judea. No people but the Jews have an original divine right to Judea. And while they remain impenitent their right passes over, not to us, but to their conquerors. ”

“ Let them take the right side, and do it heartily; for while decision saves blood, indecision may forfeit all. We may push neutrality into self-contradiction. And while we strike at a distance, let us not lay ourselves bare at home. There are such things as political feints. Moreover, if Austria, through poverty or gratitude, or Prussia, through family ties, shall be won or neutralized by Russia, let them remember that they do it at the almost certain risk of intestine rebellion, and of being despoiled in Italy and on the Rhine by foreign conquest. ”

“ And if the Turk, as a man, has as good a right as a Christian to breathe the air, Turkey, as a state, has as good a claim to subsist and be recognised by other states as England or China has. Its right would not be strengthened by its conversion, and is not impaired by its infidelity. The spiritual, although superior to the natural, does not abolish or despise it. The domination of Turkey may injure Christendom. ”

“ There has seldom been a conquest by a people whose religion was their political charter, over a people of a different faith, which bore fewer marks of cruelty. We are, indeed, pointed to the subsequent history of Turkish rule as a proof of its unparalleled wickedness. It is even argued that the Turk, having been during four hundred years put to the proof if he was fit to rule, or capable of conveying any blessing to the conquered, and having been found wanting, has thus forfeited his right. ”

“ By not being awake, we let in the wedge, and we are now suffering the penalty of having listened to the dangerous doctrine that the end sanctifies the means. Let us disown so bad a precedent. The thing which Russia seeks to do is, single-handed, to extort from Turkey pledges, or the fulfilment of alleged pledges, as to her own internal administration, the giving or fulfilling of which would be a surrender of her national integrity, in order virtually, though not yet nominally, to use her as a province and thoroughfare. ”

“ And although each nation may justly protest, as each householder may, against those acts of another which affect its just interests, and ought to do its best, by remonstrance, in the cause of truth; yet no nation derives a right from its imagined spirituality or orthodoxy to dictate the internal administration of another; and, as with individuals, so no aggregate of nations has, as a European Peace Society, a right to prescribe to any one nation terms which it shall observe on pain of war, unless that nation has consented to such arbitration. ”

“ One horn of the Crescent has long rested on Christendom by destiny. A child of destiny now rules for a second time in the West. And scarcely has he, by assuming, in professed zeal for divine reminiscences, the protectorate of holy places, excited men’s fears lest he should swell the number of those places and convert protectorate into possession, when a new protector of things sacred arises in the North, also pleading the call of destiny. ”

“ Supposing that the Turk had no title to Turkey, surely England, France, Russia and Austria, have as little right to expel him as he to be there. And the fact that they are Christian nations invests them with no new rights or political privilege. The providence of God has indeed so ordered that a knot of states in one quarter of the globe have in common embraced Christianity, and thereby risen to the head of the nations: and in many points of view, Christendom, as a collective whole, does form and can act as a corporate unity, or commonwealth. ”

“ Are we Englishmen prepared, after contesting it with those who have paved the way into the East under cloud of night, to look on when the journey is undertaken in broad day? Are we prepared to hail the tyranny of the knout, and the treachery of the bribe, as a blessed substitute for the Bash of the scimitar and the grasp of the spoiler? ”

“ Not because the policy of Turkey is revolutionary, but because he who has been the fulcrum of reaction has, by declaring war against Turkey, opened Turkey for them as a door by which they can attack him, and has justified Turkey in using them. Bad, nay blasphemous, as revolutionists32 may be, he who would hunt them out of the earth, must have an unclean conscience himself. He must feel that he has not been the Shepherd of his people, and that he has more coveted the fleece than loved the flock. ”

“ Be the cause of the Greek nation good or bad, none have been its warmer or more sincere supporters than the English. So powerful an element in our motives for the support of Greece, was the desire to emancipate Christianity from a Mahomedan yoke, that, in order to attain this end, England ran the risk of weakening, by the emancipation of Greece, the bulwark which she found in Turkey against the advances of Russia. ”

“ The religious and political champion of the Papacy is now allied to other powers on grounds with which Papal claims, religious or political, have nothing ostensibly, at least exclusively, to do. And we now see the northern protector opposed by all the great powers of Europe,—by the open protest of those who will and can withstand him,—by the tacit resistance of those who fear to be his friends, yet dare not be his foes. ”

“ Fallen though man be, and prone to evil, there is a conscience of right and wrong, as between man and man, in every clime and creed. And the first duty of those who would enlighten the consciences of men by heavenly truth, is to see that they do not claim or take license to outrage the first principles of natural justice. The rights of heathen men and states, (nay, of apostates,) in things pertaining to this world, are as sacred as those of Christians. ”

“ It may come to pass that Turkey, like any other nation, may so change for the worse its original character, and may so sin against that common law of nations which is more sacred than any statute or treaty, that, as madmen are put by their neighbours in a strait waistcoat, and they who offend against society are sent to Coventry, Turkey may provoke surrounding Governments to vote it out of Europe.1 “Necessity has no law.” ”

“ We need look no farther than to the country which now acts the champion of Christian wrongs, for a corruption of justice, a cruelty of punishment, and a smothering of true liberty, which Turkey could hardly outdo. ”

“ While it cannot be denied that the passions of the Turk too often trample down all law, the Christians on whom he has trampled, either have not yet been tried with power, or, where they have, have abused it almost as much against their own brethren. ”

“ So that, instead of directing our abhorrence against the rod by which God then smote His people, we should rather humble ourselves because we provoked Him to use it. Although the superstitious and credulous reverence for the theatre of Christ’s life on earth has too often, like the blessing of the womb that bare Him, been substituted for the hearing and keeping of His word, yet no devout mind can fail to regard the scenes of His earthly sojourn with awful interest. But the fact that our holy faith went forth from Jerusalem, gave us no right to possess that city. ”

“ And for a long series of years no part of the policy of England has been more unvarying than her resolution, expressed by deeds, to employ her just influence at the Porte in the most unwearied and enlightened disinterestedness, by embracing—often at great sacrifices and risks, and with singular success—every opportunity to plead the cause of the Christian population in the East, although belonging to a different section of the Church from her own. ”

“ While gentlemen on ’Change or in Downing Street have their minds filled with the merely material aspects of the affair, the man who yields the first place to the interests of Christ’s kingdom cannot fail to mark that we are apparently on the eve of that great war of principles which Canning foresaw,—of a religious and European war, the issues of which derive, from their very doubtfulness, only the greater solemnity. ”

“ Men forget, however, that the form of Turkish oppression has in great part arisen from the circumstance, that religious principle and secular law are, in Turkey, identified. And, as to those cruelties and wrongs which are not the offspring of law, but the fruits of its absence or breach, a comparison between Turkish administration and that of many Christian governors would not fall out much to the credit of the latter. ”

“ SHALL TURKEY LIVE OR DIE? The European war now impending differs from the last in every important feature,—in its theatre, its origin, and its issues. Never was a contest more mysterious and unexpected in its rise, more unwelcome to the majority of those engaged in it, and more pregnant with grave yet uncertain consequences. There are three classes of men whose minds it especially occupies. ”

“ It would need some sudden and flagrant excess to justify the arming of Europe against it, still more to warrant the zeal of such a solitary champion as the Czar.
But is there no other power which threatens to become, rather than Turkey, a public offender? Are the instinctive and constant apprehensions of all Europe on the side of Russia pure hallucinations? Are they not so strong as to survive every fresh apprehension from France? Is not every help which Russia has lent against revolutionary principles accepted with suspicion, as insincere ”

“ We shall best commend ourselves to God, not by skilful calculations as to the rate at which or the manner in which the chariot of His Church, as the mystery of His Coming Kingdom, rolls along the highways of His providence, but rather by ourselves abiding in the chariot, and trusting to the goodness of its Guide. ”

“ Yet while the political recognition of Turkey is right, there may be wrong grounds for doing a right thing—a right thing may be overdone—and the diplomatic relations of a Christian with a heathen nation ought, from the nature of things, never to be so intimate as those with a Christian government. ”

“ And while we ought not, on the one hand, to be paralysed in doing our duty by prophetic anticipations, neither dare we, on the other, excite ourselves to any breach of duty by a desire to see these realized. God will remove all oppressive powers which stand in His way. ”

“ No European confederacy, then, still less any single nation, can force Turkey out of Europe by resolving to impose new conditions on it, which it will not, or cannot accept. Yet we do not counsel the folding of the arms in a resignation which borders on fatalism. ”

“ The fact that God has used the Turk to chastise Christendom, and suffered him to plant his temple of falsehood on the sites of the Jewish and the Christian fanes, ought, indeed, to make us search into the reason of the punishment, but does not alter the position or rights of the instrument employed. ”

“ While the subsistence of Turkey apparently bars the fulfilment of many Christian hopes, its destruction may, by the means which bring that to pass, greatly endanger the true interests of Christendom, and frustrate the grace of God. ”

“ And the Czar has no more right, on any religious ground, to throw down the gauntlet as the champion of those other Churches, than the Pope, or the Archbishop of Canterbury. That they are neither Romanist nor Protestant is no ground, provided they are not Russian. That their faith or rites are more akin to, nay, even identical with his own, is no ground. He has no authority, human or divine, for taking such: a place as the universal champion of the East. He never pretends that members of the Russian Church are among the persecuted,21 save a few pilgrims ”

“ Although they who see in all things the guiding hand of God are warranted to expect that, in the communion of the faithful, there shall be a divine presentiment of His holy procedure, yet the4 attempt to map out the future is in too many very idle, and in some most presumptuous. On the other hand, those who try every fresh event by the mere letter of protocols, fail to apprehend its true moral importance, and would bind the God of Providence by the impotent will of man. ”

“ We may not be our own saviours. We may not arise, in self-will, to carry out God’s counsels. It is our part to expect His salvation in the way of strict duty. Men may speculate about the drying up of the Euphrates and the restoration of the Jews to their land, as they please. ”

“ Are we who, when the fancy29 took us to be suspicious, could Hardly listen to the pacific assurances of France, ready to swallow any assurance from a government, which is the impersonation of craft, and the tallowy unmoved countenance of which never yet betrayed its passions or projects? ”