I think it is clear, that, if my account be only
in the main correct, the Turkish power certainly
is not a civilized, and is a barbarous power.
The barbarian lives without principle and
without aim; he does but reflect the successive 25
outward circumstances in which he finds himself,
and he varies with them. He changes
suddenly, when their change is sudden, and is as
unlike what he was just before, as one fortune
or external condition is unlike another. He
moves when he is urged by appetite; else, he
remains in sloth and inactivity. He lives, and
he dies, and he has done nothing, but leaves the 5
world as he found it. And what the individual
is, such is his whole generation; and as that
generation, such is the generation before and
after. No generation can say what it has been
doing; it has not made the state of things better 10
or worse; for retrogression there is hardly room;
for progress, no sort of material. Now I shall
show that these characteristics of the barbarian
are rudimental points, as I may call them, in the
picture of the Turks, as drawn by those who 15
have studied them. I shall principally avail
myself of the information supplied by Mr.
Thornton and M. Volney, men of name and ability,
and for various reasons preferable as authorities
to writers of the present day. 20
"The Turks," says Mr. Thornton, who, though
not blind to their shortcomings, is certainly
favorable to them, "the Turks are of a grave
and saturnine cast ... patient of hunger and
privations, capable of enduring the hardships of 25
war, but not much inclined to habits of
industry.... They prefer apathy and indolence to
active enjoyments; but when moved by a
powerful stimulus they sometimes indulge in pleasures
in excess." "The Turk," he says elsewhere, 30
"stretched at his ease on the banks of the Bosphorus,
glides down the stream of existence
without reflection on the past, and without
anxiety for the future. His life is one continued
and unvaried reverie. To his imagination the
whole universe appears occupied in procuring him 5
pleasures.... Every custom invites to repose,
and every object inspires an indolent
voluptuousness. Their delight is to recline on soft verdure
under the shade of trees, and to muse without
fixing the attention, lulled by the trickling of a 10
fountain or the murmuring of a rivulet, and
inhaling through their pipe a gently inebriating
vapor. Such pleasures, the highest which the
rich can enjoy, are equally within the reach of
the artisan or the peasant." 15
M. Volney corroborates this account of them:
"Their behavior," he says, "is serious, austere,
and melancholy; they rarely laugh, and the
gayety of the French appears to them a fit of
delirium. When they speak, it is with 20
deliberation, without gestures and without passion;
they listen without interrupting you; they are
silent for whole days together, and they by no
means pique themselves on supporting
conversation. If they walk, it is always leisurely, and 25
on business. They have no idea of our
troublesome activity, and our walks backwards and
forwards for amusement. Continually seated,
they pass whole days smoking, with their legs
crossed, their pipes in their mouths, and almost 30
without changing their attitude." Englishmen
present as great a contrast to the Ottoman as the
French; as a late English traveler brings before
us, apropos of seeing some Turks in quarantine:
"Certainly," he says, "Englishmen are the least
able to wait, and the Turks the most so, of any 5
people I have ever seen. To impede an
Englishman's locomotion on a journey, is equivalent to
stopping the circulation of his blood; to disturb
the repose of a Turk on his, is to reawaken him
to a painful sense of the miseries of life. The 10
one nation at rest is as much tormented as
Prometheus, chained to his rock, with the vulture
feeding on him; the other in motion is as
uncomfortable as Ixion tied to his ever-moving wheel."[38]
[38] Formby's Visit, p. 70.
However, the barbarian, when roused to action, 15
is a very different being from the barbarian
at rest. "The Turk," says Mr. Thornton, "is
usually placid, hypochondriac, and
unimpassioned; but, when the customary sedateness of
his temper is ruffled, his passions ... are 20
furious and uncontrollable. The individual seems
possessed with all the ungovernable fury of a
multitude; and all ties, all attachments, all
natural and moral obligations, are forgotten or
despised, till his rage subsides." A similar 25
remark is made by a writer of the day: "The Turk
on horseback has no resemblance to the Turk
reclining on his carpet. He there assumes a
vigor, and displays a dexterity, which few
Europeans would be capable of emulating; no 30
horsemen surpass the Turks; and, with all the
indolence of which they are accused, no people
are more fond of the violent exercise of riding."
So was it with their ancestors, the Tartars;
now dosing on their horses or their wagons, now 5
galloping over the plains from morning to night.
However, these successive phases of Turkish
character, as reported by travelers, have seemed
to readers as inconsistencies in their reports;
Thornton accepts the inconsistency. "The 10
national character of the Turks," he says, "is a
composition of contradictory qualities. We find
them brave and pusillanimous; gentle and
ferocious; resolute and inconstant; active and
indolent; fastidiously abstemious, and 15
indiscriminately indulgent. The great are alternately
haughty and humble, arrogant and cringing,
liberal and sordid."[39] What is this but to say in
one word that we find them barbarians?
[39] Bell's Geography.
According to these distinct moods or phases 20
of character, they will leave very various
impressions of themselves on the minds of successive
beholders. A traveler finds them in their
ordinary state in repose and serenity; he is surprised
and startled to find them so different from what 25
he imagined; he admires and extols them, and
inveighs against the prejudice which has
slandered them to the European world. He finds them
mild and patient, tender to the brute creation, as
becomes the children of a Tartar shepherd, kind 30
and hospitable, self-possessed and dignified, the
lowest classes sociable with each other, and the
children gamesome. It is true; they are as noble
as the lion of the desert, and as gentle and as
playful as the fireside cat. Our traveler observes 5
all this;[40] and seems to forget that from the
humblest to the highest of the feline tribe, from
the cat to the lion, the most wanton and
tyrannical cruelty alternates with qualities more
engaging or more elevated. Other barbarous 10
tribes also have their innocent aspects--from
the Scythians in the classical poets and historians
down to the Lewchoo islanders in the pages of
Basil Hall.
[40] Vid. Sir Charles Fellows' Asia Minor.
But whatever be the natural excellences of 15
the Turks, progressive they are not. This Sir
Charles Fellows seems to allow: "My intimacy
with the character of the Turks," he says, "which
has led me to think so highly of their moral
excellence, has not given me the same favorable 20
impression of the development of their mental
powers. Their refinement is of manners and
affections; there is little cultivation or activity
of mind among them." This admission implies
a great deal, and brings us to a fresh 25
consideration. Observe, they were in the eighth century
of their political existence when Thornton and
Volney lived among them, and these authors
report of them as follows: "Their buildings,"
says Thornton, "are heavy in their proportions, 30
bad in detail, both in taste and execution,
fantastic in decoration, and destitute of genius.
Their cities are not decorated with public
monuments, whose object is to enliven or to embellish."
Their religion forbids them every sort of 5
painting, sculpture, or engraving; thus the fine arts
cannot exist among them. They have no music
but vocal; and know of no accompaniment
except a bass of one note like that of the bagpipe.
Their singing is in a great measure recitative, 10
with little variation of note. They have scarcely
any notion of medicine or surgery; and they do
not allow of anatomy. As to science, the
telescope, the microscope, the electric battery, are
unknown, except as playthings. The compass 15
is not universally employed in their navy, nor
are its common purposes thoroughly understood.
Navigation, astronomy, geography, chemistry,
are either not known, or practiced only on
antiquated and exploded principles. As to their 20
civil and criminal codes of law, these are
unalterably fixed in the Koran....
Compare the Rome of Junius Brutus to the
Rome of Constantine, 800 years afterwards. In
each of these polities there was a continuous 25
progression, and the end was unlike the
beginning; but the Turks, except that they have gained
the faculty of political union, are pretty much
what they were when they crossed the Jaxartes
and Oxus. Again, at the time of Togrul Beg, the 30
Greek schism also took place; now from Michael
Cerularius, in 1054, to Anthimus, in 1853,
Patriarchs of Constantinople, eight centuries have
passed of religious deadness and insensibility: a
longer time has passed in China of a similar
political inertness: yet China has preserved at 5
least the civilization, and Greece the ecclesiastical
science, with which they respectively passed into
their long sleep; but the Turks of this day are
still in the less than infancy of art, literature,
philosophy, and general knowledge; and we may 10
fairly conclude that, if they have not learned
the very alphabet of science in eight hundred
years, they are not likely to set to work on it in
the nine hundredth.
* * * * *
It is true that in the last quarter of a century 15
efforts have been made by the government of
Constantinople to innovate on the existing
condition of its people; and it has addressed itself
in the first instance to certain details of daily
Turkish life. We must take it for granted that it 20
began with such changes as were easiest; if so, its
failure in these small matters suggests how little
ground there is for hope of success in other
advances more important and difficult. Every
one knows that in the details of dress, carriage, 25
and general manners, the Turks are very
different from Europeans: so different, and so
consistently different, that the contrariety would
seem to arise from some difference of essential
principle. "This dissimilitude," says Mr.
Thornton, "which pervades the whole of their habits,
is so general, even in things of apparent
insignificance, as almost to indicate design rather than
accident...." 5
To learn from others, you must entertain a
respect for them; no one listens to those whom
he contemns. Christian nations make progress
in secular matters, because they are aware they
have many things to learn, and do not mind from 10
whom they learn them, so that he be able to teach.
It is true that Christianity, as well as
Mahometanism, which imitated it, has its visible polity,
and its universal rule, and its especial
prerogatives and powers and lessons, for its disciples. 15
But, with a Divine wisdom, and contrary to its
human copyist, it has carefully guarded (if I
may use the expression) against extending its
revelations to any point which would blunt the
keenness of human research or the activity of 20
human toil. It has taken those matters for its
field in which the human mind, left to itself,
could not profitably exercise itself, or progress,
if it would; it has confined its revelations to the
province of theology, only indirectly touching 25
on other departments of knowledge, so far as
theological truth accidentally affects them; and
it has shown an equally remarkable care in
preventing the introduction of the spirit of caste
or race into its constitution or administration. 30
Pure nationalism it abhors; its authoritative
documents pointedly ignore the distinction of
Jew and Gentile, and warn us that the first often
becomes the last; while its subsequent history
has illustrated this great principle, by its awful,
and absolute, and inscrutable, and irreversible 5
passage from country to country, as its territory
and its home. Such, then, it has been in the
Divine counsels, and such, too, as realized in fact;
but man has ways of his own, and, even before
its introduction into the world, the inspired 10
announcements, which preceded it, were distorted
by the people to whom they were given, to
minister to views of a very different kind. The
secularized Jews, relying on the supernatural
favors locally and temporally bestowed on 15
themselves, fell into the error of supposing that a
conquest of the earth was reserved for some mighty
warrior of their own race, and that, in
compensation of the reverses which befell them, they
were to become an imperial nation. 20
What a contrast is presented to us by these
different ideas of a universal empire! The
distinctions of race are indelible; a Jew cannot
become a Greek, or a Greek a Jew; birth is an
event of past time; according to the Judaizers, 25
their nation, as a nation, was ever to be
dominant; and all other nations, as such, were
inferior and subject. What was the necessary
consequence? There is nothing men more pride
themselves on than birth, for this very reason, 30
that it is irrevocable; it can neither be given to
those who have it not, nor taken away from
those who have. The Almighty can do anything
which admits of doing; He can compensate every
evil; but a Greek poet says that there is one
thing impossible to Him--to undo what is 5
done. Without throwing the thought into a
shape which borders on the profane, we may see
in it the reason why the idea of national power
was so dear and so dangerous to the Jew. It was
his consciousness of inalienable superiority that 10
led him to regard Roman and Greek, Syrian and
Egyptian, with ineffable arrogance and scorn.
Christians, too, are accustomed to think of those
who are not Christians as their inferiors; but the
conviction which possesses them, that they have 15
what others have not, is obviously not open to
the temptation which nationalism presents.
According to their own faith, there is no insuperable
gulf between themselves and the rest of mankind;
there is not a being in the whole world but is 20
invited by their religion to occupy the same
position as themselves, and, did he come, would
stand on their very level, as if he had ever been
there. Such accessions to their body they
continually receive, and they are bound under 25
obligation of duty to promote them. They never
can pronounce of any one, now external to them,
that he will not some day be among them; they
never can pronounce of themselves that, though
they are now within, they may not some day 30
be found outside, the Divine polity. Such are
the sentiments inculcated by Christianity, even
in the contemplation of the very superiority
which it imparts; even there it is a principle, not
of repulsion between man and man, but of good
fellowship; but as to subjects of secular 5
knowledge, since here it does not arrogate any
superiority at all, it has in fact no tendency whatever
to center its disciple's contemplation on himself,
or to alienate him from his kind. He readily
acknowledges and defers to the superiority in 10
art or science of those, if so be, who are
unhappily enemies to Christianity. He admits the
principle of progress on all matters of knowledge
and conduct on which the Creator has not decided
the truth already by revealing it; and he is at 15
all times ready to learn, in those merely secular
matters, from those who can teach him best.
Thus it is that Christianity, even negatively, and
without contemplating its positive influences, is
the religion of civilization. 20