GREBES AND TITRES.
Bayswater, 29th March 1854. Sin—'The 'wild word-spinning of your correspondent E. A. F., running fan- tastically over two 'columns and a fragtnent of a column of your last 'paper, eevapele me thin soon to snatch up the pen for a second encroachment upon the nessesarily limited space devoted in the Spectator to such epistolary com- munications.
E. A. F. is a-scholar, and, like most of his class, more conversant with 'in- dent than modern history. It is, indeed, easy enough to utter schoolboy commonplaces respecting Leonidas and the Three Hundred, and to affirm boldly that the Greeks of today are a race fully as noble as the Greeks in the time of Xerxes ; easier still to contract the gnarling muscles into sneers at great-hearted Shaftesbury and the distinguished dieentomber of the winged lions. It is not quite so easy to put one's self face to face with the realities of the hour we live in. But there are, I think, one or two points on which E. A. F. might have informed himself before pronouncing so dogmatically upon Greeks and Turks. This, I expect, would have been done even by those enlightened green-turtle men who the other day elected a President for Christ Church Hospital solely because their candidate chanced to be the son of that royal, rotund, and sto- machic personage, who more than any Briton not within the privileged circle of turtlers, enjoyed a public dinner at the public's expense. But now it strikes me, that perhaps as the brains of /Eschylus were crushed by the falling tortoise, so have those of E. A. F. been scattered by one of those ponderous "Stars of the East" of late gratuitously showered away at popular assem- blages by Pro-Russian missionaries. If so, I would pity rather than con- demn.
Let me now advert to these points. 1. E. A. F. speaks of our having "enfranchised a small portion of the Greek warren, dividing enslaved and independent Greece by a line drawn at haphazard." Again he writes, "It cannot be merely Russian agency which has driven the whole Greek nation to arms." Yes, E. A. F. must have been smitten by the "Star of the East." In all European Turkey there are just 14,000,000 of Christians of the Greek Church ; three-fourths of whom are allied in blood to the Turks, while there are scarcely 1,000,000 of Greek blood. Of these 1,000,000, some 600,000 form the agricultural, unwarlike, and contented population of Thessaly, who look on the Turks as their protectors. Russia's sole hope then rests on a few thousand meti on the Pindus, (5000 at the utmost,) swollen by Pro-Russian soribea, whose assumptions have been indorsed by E. A. F., into 6,000,000 of enemies to the Sultan.
2. E. A. F. talks of the frightful oppression of the Christians of Turkey— oppression so savage that, as he thinks, no one can "honestly argue that the Christian population of Romania owe any such allegiance to their Mahe- metan rulers as is due even to the worst of Western governments." I would ask your correspondent, if amongst these oppreasions is to be reckoned the municipal system, according to which the heads of families of all creeds in every commune settle ansongst them the taxes to be levied there ? The capi- tation tax, of course, is another frightful grievance ; but its payment exempts the Christians from serving as soldiers, as they have again and again de- clared their willingness to -double it rather than be subjected to the military Conscription. The removal of this impost is now being forced upon the Sul- tan, and on the Christians themselves, who dislike being drawn for soldiers rather more than the generality of our young men do being drawn for the militia ; and relieving them from the Kharatasch will work out admira- bly the ends ef Russia by convulsing the Ottoman empire. One word More on this point. E. A. F. asserts that the Greek's "creed still excludes him from all office and dignity." As for "dignity," I believe the Greeks ages ago bade a long farewell to that. As to office, your scholarly cor- respondent has sorely misstated facts ; numbers of Greeks filling the highest offices in the Ottoman empire, many of them even being representatives of the Sultan in foreign countries, amongst whom I need only mention 31. 31us- gurus, a Christian add a genuine Greek, now Ambassador of the Sublime Porte at the Court of St. James's.
8. E. A. F. again and again brands the Turks as "infidel,"—" infidel despots," &a., &c. ; and stigmatizes as "fanatical amateurs of Islam" all who differ in the slightest from his bigoted foregone conclusions. But I would fearlessly ask him, what nation in modern times have been such faithful observers of treaties as these brutal Moslems ; and of what race have conscientious travellers, from Byron to Layard, borne such eulogistic testi- mony as to their conduct as individuals ? Mr. David Urquhart has highly lauded them, and many still consider that his praise exceeds their merited due. I differ with them. Mr. Urquhart has done very well—very well in- deed, as a mere unmitigated Celt. He has had the misfortune to be born the head of a Highland elan, and somehow the eagle's feather occasionally gets into his eyes. It would require a person with a clearer notion of what real nobility consists in to fully appreciate the true spirit of equality and fraternity to be found rarely save amongst the Turks. What a contrast do they not, in this respect furnish to the vulgar individuals composing the " stuck-up " classes into which is divided this "Christian," civilized, and mobocrat nation
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