rettru t t&tor.

THE REVOLT TH EPIRUS.

Sm—Since I wrote the letter—the last with which I have troubled you— which you did me the honour to insert some months back, on the Turkish question, an event has occurred which, from my point of view, gives an en- tirely new aspect to the whole matter. The Christian inhabitants of an im- portant part of what is miscalled " Turkey " have taken the law into their own hands. The popular cry seems to be—" Rebels against our ally ! Traitors to the beneficent sovereignty of the Sultan ! Smite them hip and thigh for the love of the Prophet!' Now, I cannot help looking a little further into the matter, which I trust I may be allowed to do under your auspices.

The chief points on which I insisted in my former letter were, that, while it AM impossible to have any sympathy with "Turkey," yet the balance of interest and the balance of duty ought to induce us to oppose Russia, and therefore incidentally to support Turkey. I am intellectually convinced that our war with Russia is right and expedient ; but I am only intellectu- ally convinced ; I can get up no enthusiasm on behalf of the barbarian ; I cannot understand the burning ardour for war ; and I honour the Ministers for leaving no stone unturned to avoid a contest which should even have the appearance of being waged against liberty and Christianity. Yet I believe. that, of the two evils, Turkish bondage is a less heavy yoke than Russian ; and for that reason, for the sake of the Greeks themselves, Iam for strenuous opposition to the Muscovite, though not for fratemiz ion with the Ottoman.

The abstract love of Turks, which seems at present to possess the public mind, is to me the greatest marvel that I have ever come across. The fear of the Pope three or four years ago had at least some sort of shadow to go upon, but the newly kindled affection for his old adversary is one of those facts of which I am content to acknowledge the existence without undertakinp to explain the cause. I can only conceive that it is sheer ignorance; that people conceive "Turkey" to be correlative to " Turk " in the same way as "England," "France," and "Spain," are to "Englishman," "French- man," and "Spaniard." Yet this is certainly not all. In accordance with the custom of the day, I as giving a popular lecture on the subject a little time back. I depicted the gallant resistance of Circassia for twenty or thirty years against the encroachments of Russia, and was almost overpowered by the plaudits of my audience. I then turned the subject to the similar resist- ance of Montenegro for nearly five hundred years against the assaults of the infidel, and the signs of admiration were few and feeble indeed.

This truly illustrates the state of mind of the mass of people at this mo- ment. The Hebdomadal Board talking about the liberties of Oxford is really a spectacle less ludicrous than that of Lord Dudley Stuart, once so eloquent about the wrongs of the Pole and the Magyar, now stigmatizing the inde- pendent state of Montenegro with rebellion, and asserting the divine right of

every barbarian miscreant to lord it at will over the countryman of Leonidas and Alexander, of Palreologus and Scanderbeg. The politics of statesmen of this class seem to be fashioned after the model of the theology of a certain class of divines satirized by a late acute writer in the Edinburgh Review. The religion of the one consists in "love of Jews and hatred of Papists " ; their secular imitators simply vary the particular class of the circumcised and the particular class of the baptized ; their politics consist in "love of Turks and hatred of Greeks." It seems, in fact, to be more than a mere analogy. Puritanism and " Turkism " have kissed each other under the auspices of Lord Shaftesbury. The alliance is not surprising. In both, the creed con- sists of a "portentous bibliolatry," and the ritual in hearkening to sermons ;

in both, till very lately, there was the same love of whitewash and hatred of art: indeed, the singular queries put by an eminent female leader of the one sect to a prelate whose labours were cast among the professors of the other might possibly suggest an additional point of reaemblance. The whole prac- tical upshot is that Lord Shaftesbury has discovered that he can circulate Bibles in Turkey, while he cannot in Russia. Did he ever inquire what -would be the consequences to any Turk whom he thereby induced to embrace the faith of Exeter Hall ?

The other allies of the infidel present a more singular and unaccount- able spectacle. Orators whose mouths used to be full of declamations about liberty, oppression, and the like, are seized with an extraordinary fit of reverence for the powers that be ; we hear now of legitimate sovereigns, the rights of governments, the duty of subjects, and the like. The com- paratively insignificant wrongs of comparatively insignificant nations used to set our popular meetings in a flame ; but could Byron himself come again, his most glowing strains would apparently fall lifeless upon the ears of men who still boast themselves as enemies to despotism and asserters of oppressed nationalities.

Montenegro is an independent state : technical diplomacy may perhaps not recognize it, but its independence is secured by those barriers of God's own making, which,

"while around them kneel In sullen hornw,*e to the Thracian steel, Teach the pale despot's waning moon to fear

The patriot terrors of the mountain spear."

If the Vladika of Czernagora is a rebel because he has never yielded to the invader, the last Emperor of the Romans was a rebel too for daring to defend the city of Constantine after Hadrianople and Thessalonica had fallen. But the Vladika, we hear, is a Russian agent ; half his revenues come from the Czar's treasury. And no wonder, if, betrayed by every other Christian pow- er, he accepts the only alliance offered him, and does not weigh the Imperial motives in the balance of a Western Foreign Office. So, too, with independent Greece, and with the new insurgents in Epirus. If they are Russian parti- sans, we have made them so. Russia presents the prim& facie aspect of a champion of their religion and nationality : we see through the mask ; so do many of the more enlightened among themselves ; but it is too much to ex- pect so clear a vision among the mass of a people ground down by the tyranny of five hundred years. And yet it cannot be merely Russian agency which has driven the whole Greek nation to arms. The Russian war is doubtless seized upon as the occasion, but it can hardly be more than the oc- casion. And surely had England and France, through the whole of this cen- tury, played that part sincerely which Russia plays hypocritically, their hearts would now be for us rather than for the Muscovite.

Now, looking at the matter impartially, I suppose no one, except those few who may still hold that no resistance to any kind of government can ever be lawful under any circumstances, will deny that the Christians of Turkey would have been abstractedly justified in revolt at any moment since the infidel invader first landed upon their shores. I say abstractedly, be- cause the exercise of this right may under some circumstances have been so desperately imprudent as to cease to be justifiable ; that is, the revolt would have produced a greater amount of human misery than the continuance of the bondage. But surely it cannot be honestly argued that the Christian population of Romania owe any such allegiance to their Mahometan rulers as is due to even the worst of Western governments. We hear that they are " subjects " of the Sultan, that he is their "legitimate sovereign " ; in answer to doubts, we are asked whether conquest can never confer a legiti- mate title? Now there is a fallacy in the word " subjeot" : when we say that an Englishman is "a British subject," we mean something very differ- ent from what is really implied when we say that a Greek or a Slave is "a Turkish subject." In the one case, "subject" means woXiTne, in the other ipwhicoor. We say "a British subject," and "an American citizen" be- cause the one commonwealth admits and the other rejects a monarchical head; we say "a French subject," and introduce the further idea of per- sonal subjection to a despot : but when we call a Rayah a "Turkish subject," we add to this last the idea of national degradation ; he is not merely a sub- ject of the Sultan as his ruler—he is a member of a subject race. The phrase, so innocent in the other cases, now expresses the odious supremacy of race over race, of religion over religion. Yet people talk as if the Greek were simply a sort of Dissenter; even if they at all realize the difference of race and language, they consider him as no worse off than a Welsh Method- ist or an Irish Papist.* Yet nothing hinders either of those religionists from becoming Prime Minister of England ; no penalty attaches to the English Churchman who may choose to exchange the national communion for theirs. Allegiance implies protection as its correlative ; as soon as a government founded on conquest really affords protection, it is as much entitled to alle- giance as one founded on election or hereditary right. But the Greek has never received at the hand of his Moslem lord such protection as to owe any repayment of allegiance. He still remains subject to the most odious of tyrannies, that of strangers in his own land ; strangers as much at this moment as when the folly of Cantacuzenus first landed them on this side the Bosporus.

But I shall be told that all this belongs to an older day ; ,that Turkey is reformed, that the Tanzimat is passed, that the Sultan is the most tolerant of rulers ; that the Osmanlis have adopted frock-coats, bayonets, and divers other Occidental and Christian institutions. We have heard of this Tanzi- mat as if its concession was the most beneficent act of uncalled-for liber- ality—as if all our own legislation from 2Ethelberht to Victoria were nothing to it : yet, as far as I can make out, even where best observed, it simply se- cures to the Christians that they shall not be robbed, ravished, or murdered with impunity, while even these provisions are a dead letter in many parts of the empire. The Greek has no more of a national government than before ; his creed still excludes him from all office and dignity ,- he is still a member of a subject race, ruled over by strangers, or worse still, by apes. tates of his own blood, whose ordinary path to power, as being one inter Christianos non nominandum, is very conveniently passed over by the ad- vocates of barbarism and infidelity.

I fully confess that the present insurrection presents some unpleasing features. Ever since David went down into the cave of Adullam, all insur- rectionary and irregular movements, however righteous in themselves, have attracted a certain proportion of discreditable followers ; and their leaders have not been able to exercise the same choice, or to preserve the same disci- pline, as the commanders of a regular army. But I believe that in this case the proportion of cut-throats and cut-purses, and of excesses committed by .them, goes beyond the licence which must be conceded in such cases. Yet it is impossible not to believe that there is a nucleus of real patriotic insur- rection aroused by real oppreasion. As for Russian agency, the case is simply this. The insurgents have chosen their time, according to their own view, well; if it is an inconvenient one for us, it is our own fault. We enfran- chise a small portion of the Greek nation, dividing enslaved and independent Greece by a line drawn at haphazard. We then turn about, mock at inde- pendent Greece for being a "petty state," and think it monstrous if kinsmen on each side of an utterly arbitrary boundary sympathize with one another. We give them a form of government altogether unsuited to their condition, and then blame them for being badly governed. We boast ourselves as the allies of their oppressors ; and wonder if they are beguiled by a power who. comes among them with the fair words of liberty and protection. And now, when they have ventured to assert their own rights, it is demanded that England and France should unite in pressing the yoke of the infidel despot once more upon their necks. The cry is heard as of old-

waiiise 'EXAsieioe,

iXeu0Epoi?rE IXEudEportra di TralSav, TuvaiKas, 9'am TE sra.rpfeew

NKas irpoyeivwv,

And must the two great nations of the West have to record— Kai gijv 7rai itan, flapPii pay 7Xcbcrans eaos.

imnprriaKEv.

Surely it may be possible to resist the Muscovite without being compelled to bear arms against men who have reared the banner of Constantine in the old realm of the ./Eacidre. I know not to what professional honour might lead me, if actually called on, but, writing quietly at home, I feel as if no motive, no compulsion, could induce me to strike a single blow against patriots fighting under the glorious labarum for Christ and freedom. Perish diplomatic skill and military honour, perish the balance of power and all for which we are supposed to contend, before the arms of England are profaned to such burning infamy as this. But we are told, would you revive the dam of the Crusades ?—would you preach a religious war in the nineteenth 'century ?—Far from it ; but it

should be remembered that Eastern Europe is not yet in the nineteenth cen-

tury. We are not called upon to interfere to make the Mahometan worse off than the Christian, but we are called upon to interfere, especially with an effete power which we patch up for our own convenience, to hinder the Christian from being in any sense worse oft' than the Mahometan. This our Ministers are effectually labouring to do. The language of Lord Clarendon in the House of Lords fully recognizes the duty of Western to Eastern Christians, and altogether goes as far as could be expected from one who has the letter of existing treaties and the diplomatic conventionalities of generations tied about his neck, and who is officially bound to set phrases about the "inde- pendence and integrity," &c. Our illustrious representative at Constanti- nople is labouring hard, as ever, to wring some measure of justice from the infidel despot. But it remains to be seen whether the "Turkish Govern- ment" will have the will to concede, or the power to carry out, a real mea- sure of religious liberty, or whether its "subjects" will accept such tardy and compulsory concessions. Widely different from the Ministerial language is that of Mr. Layard and. ' his class, the fanatical amateurs of Islam, who grudge the Eastern Christians the slightest measure of sympathy, and quarrel with any stipulations on their behalf. In Lord Ellenborough the faith of M.ahomet may boast of a promising convert : there was a time when his sympathies were chiefly in- listed on behalf of the god Siva, and displayed by acts of chivalrous devo- tion, beside which I feel that my zeal for the recovery of St. Sophia mush appear cold indeed. Is not the Sultan's new ally the same who once undid the work of Mahmoud, and metered those gates of Somnauth which had been carried off eight centuries before by the sacrilegious Moslem ? As for Mr. Layard himself, I am chiefly anxious to learn where he found his facts about "Goths, Huns, and Vandals," who "could not establish their barbarous systems, but only deluged the world with blood." As Mr. Layard seriously believes in Memnon's presence at the siege of Troy, I do not know whether his notions of the "Wandering of the Nations" may not be equally antediluvian. Certainly the union of Goths and Huns has an odd sound. I should not have classed Theodoric among those who "deluged the world with

• An Irish Papist would have been very nearly a real analogy a century back,

blood" ; and as for the Huns, surely their ethnical kindred might claim some sympathy from a professed admirer of the Turk.

But one man at least remains who can see that words cannot change their meaning nor things their nature to suit the convenience of diplomacy. Earl Grey sets forth the naked truth like a man, an Englishman, and a Chris- tian; one who has not degenerated from the illustrious stock of which he springs ; one who cannot bring himself to speak of the cause of oppression as the cause of liberty, the cause of persecution as that of tolerance. With his general view on the war question, as you know, I do not sympathize ; but one forgets such differences in a man who has courage to avow that the Cause of Grecian liberty is, whether wisely proclaimed or not, as essentially righteous now as it was thirty or two thousand years ago. Even if there be circumstances about this particular insurrection which may forbid its obtaining the same hold on our sympathies as the old struggles of Thermo- pylai and Drageshan, of Eira and Mesolonghi, it only becomes more neces- sary to assert the general principle, which is likely to be clouded over by the incidental peculiarities of the moment.

I have trespassed grievously on your space. I had something to say about Oxford matters, something about Parliamentary Reform. But you will doubtless think the present effusion enough for at least as many months to come as have elapsed since your kind insertion of its predecessor.