1.
My object in the sketch which I have been attempting, of the history
of the Turks, has been to show the relation of this celebrated race to
Europe and to Christendom. I have not been led to speak of them by any
especial interest in them for their own sake, but by the circumstances
of the present moment, which bring them often before us, oblige us to
speak of them, and involve the necessity of entertaining some definite
sentiments about them. With this view I have been considering their
antecedents; whence they came, how they came, where they are, and what
title they have to be there at all. When I now say, that I am
proceeding to contemplate their future, do not suppose me to be so rash
as to be hazarding any political prophecy; I do but mean to set down
some characteristics in their existing state (if I have any right to
fancy, that in any true measure we at the distance of some thousand
miles know it), which naturally suggest to us to pursue their
prospective history in one direction, not in another.
Now it seems safe to say, in the first place, that some time or
other the Ottomans will come to an end. All human power has its
termination sooner or later; states rise to fall; and, secure as they
may be now, so one day they will be in peril and in course of
overthrow. Nineveh, Tyre, Babylon, Persia, Egypt, and Greece, each has
had its day; and this was so clear to mankind 2,000 years ago, that the
conqueror of Carthage wept, as he gazed upon its flames, for he saw in
them the conflagration of her rival, his own Rome. “Fuit Ilium.”
The Saracens, the Moguls, have had their day; those European states, so
great three centuries ago, Spain and Poland, Venice and Genoa, are now
either extinct or in decrepitude. What is the lot of all states, is
still more strikingly fulfilled in the case of empires; kingdoms indeed
are of slow growth, but empires commonly are but sudden manifestations
of power, which are as short-lived as they are sudden. Even the Roman
empire, which is an exception, did not last beyond five hundred years;
the Saracenic three hundred; the Spanish three hundred; the Russian has
lasted about a hundred and fifty, that is, since the Czar Peter; the
British not a hundred; the Ottoman has reached four or five. If there
be an empire which does not at all feel the pressure of this natural
law, but lasts continuously, repairs its losses, renews its vigour, and
with every successive age emulates its antecedent fame, such a power
must be more than human, and has no place in our present inquiry. We
are concerned, not with any supernatural power, to which is promised
perpetuity, but with the Ottoman empire, famous in history, vigorous in
constitution, but, after all, human, and nothing more. There is, then,
neither risk nor merit in prophesying the eventual fall of the
Osmanlis, as of the Seljukians, as of the Gaznevides before them; the
only wonder is that they actually have lasted as much as four hundred
years.
Such will be the issue and the sum of their whole history; but,
certain as this is, and confidently as it may be pronounced, nothing
else can be prudently asserted about their future. Times and moments
are in the decrees of the All-wise, and known to Him alone; and so are
the occurrences to which they give birth. The only further point open
to conjecture, as being not quite destitute of data for speculating
upon it, is the particular course of events and quality of
circumstances, which will precede the downfall of the Turkish power;
for, granting that that downfall is to come, it is reasonable to think
it will take place in that particular way, for which in their present
state we see an existing preparation, if such can be discerned, or in a
way which at least is not inconsistent with the peculiarities of that
present state.
2.
Hence, in speculating on this question, I shall take this as a
reasonable assumption first of all, that the catastrophe of a state is
according to its antecedents, and its destiny according to its nature;
and therefore, that we cannot venture on any anticipation of the
instruments or the conditions of its death, until we know something
about the principle and the character of its life. Next I lay down,
that, whereas a state is in its very idea a society, and a society is a
collection of many individuals made one by their participation in some
common possession, and to the extent of that common possession, the
presence of that possession held in common constitutes the life, and
the loss of it constitutes the dissolution, of a state. In like manner,
whatever avails or tends to withdraw that common possession, is either
fatal or prejudicial to the social union. As regards the Ottoman power,
then, we have to inquire what its life consists in, and what are the
dangers to which that life, from the nature of its constitution, is
exposed.
Now, states may be broadly divided into barbarous and
civilized; their common possession, or life, is some object either
of sense or of imagination; and their bane and
destruction is either external or internal. And, to speak
in general terms, without allowing for exceptions or limitations (for I
am treating the subject scientifically only so far as is requisite for
my particular inquiry), we may pronounce that barbarous states
live in a common imagination, and are destroyed from without
; whereas civilized states live in some common object of sense, and are destroyed from within.
By external enemies I mean foreign wars, foreign influence,
insurrection of slaves or of subject races, famine, accidental
enormities of individuals in power, and other instruments analogous to
what, in the case of an individual, is called a violent death; by
internal I mean civil contention, excessive changes, revolution,
decay of public spirit, which may be considered analogous to natural
death.
Again, by objects of imagination, I mean such as religion,
true or false (for there are not only false imaginations but true),
divine mission of a sovereign or of a dynasty, and historical fame; and
by objects of sense, such as secular interests, country, home,
protection of person and property.
I do not allude to the conservative power of habit when I speak of
the social bond, because habit is rather the necessary result of
possessing a common object, and protects all states equally, barbarous
and civilized. Nor do I include moral degeneracy among the instruments
of their destruction, because this too attaches to all states,
civilized and barbarous, and is rather a disposition exposing them to
the influence of what is their bane, than a direct cause of their ruin
in itself.
3.
But what is meant by the words barbarous and civilized, as applied to political bodies? this is a question which it will take
more time to answer, even if I succeed in satisfying it at all. By
“barbarism,” then, I suppose, in itself is meant a state of nature; and
by “civilization,” a state of mental cultivation and discipline. In a
state of nature man has reason, conscience, affections, and passions,
and he uses these severally, or rather is influenced by them, according
to circumstances; and whereas they do not one and all necessarily move
in the same direction, he takes no great pains to make them agree
together, but lets them severally take their course, and, if I may so
speak, jostle into a sort of union, and get on together, as best they
can. He does not improve his talents; he does not simplify and fix his
motives; he does not put his impulses under the control of principle,
or form his mind upon a rule. He grows up pretty much what he was when
a child; capricious, wayward, unstable, idle, irritable, excitable;
with not much more of habituation than that which experience of living
unconsciously forces even on the brutes. Brutes act upon instinct, not
on reason; they are ferocious when they are hungry; they fiercely
indulge their appetite; they gorge themselves; they fall into torpor
and inactivity. In a like, but a more human way, the savage is drawn by
the object held up to him, as if he could not help following it; an
excitement rushes on him, and he yields to it without a struggle; he
acts according to the moment, without regard to consequences; he is
energetic or slothful, tempestuous or calm, as the winds blow or the
sun shines. He is one being to-day, another to-morrow, as if he were
simply the sport of influences or circumstances. If he is raised
somewhat above this extreme state of barbarism, just one idea or
feeling occupies the narrow range of his thoughts, to the exclusion of
others.
Moreover, brutes differ from men in this; that they cannot invent,
cannot progress. They remain in the use of those faculties and methods,
which nature gave them at their birth. They are endowed by the law of
their being with certain weapons of defence, and they do not improve on
them. They have food, raiment, and dwelling, ready at their command.
They need no arrow or noose to catch their prey, nor kitchen to dress
it; no garment to wrap round them, nor roof to shelter them. Their
claws, their teeth, their viscera, are their butcher and their cook;
and their fur is their wardrobe. The cave or the jungle is their home;
or if it is their nature to exercise some architectural craft, they
have not to learn it. But man comes into the world with the
capabilities, rather than the means and appliances, of life. He begins
with a small capital, but one which admits of indefinite improvement.
He is, in his very idea, a creature of progress. He starts, the
inferior of the brute animals, but he surpasses them in the long run;
he subjects them to himself, and he goes forward on a career, which at
least hitherto has not found its limit.
Even the savage of course in some measure exemplifies this law of
human nature, and is lord of the brutes; and what he is and man is
generally, compared with the inferior animals, such is man civilized
compared with the barbarian. Civilization is that state to which man's
nature points and tends; it is the systematic use, improvement, and
combination of those faculties which are his characteristic; and,
viewed in its idea, it is the perfection, the happiness of our mortal
state. It is the development of art out of nature, and of
self-government out of passion, and of certainty out of opinion, and of
faith out of reason. It is the due disposition of the various powers of
the soul, each in its place, the subordination or subjection of the
inferior, and the union of all into one whole. Aims, rules, views,
habits, projects; prudence, foresight, observation, inquiry, invention,
resource, resolution, perseverance, are its characteristics. Justice,
benevolence, expedience, propriety, religion, are its recognized, its
motive principles. Supernatural truth is its sovereign law. Such is it
in its true idea, synonymous with Christianity; and, not only in idea,
but in matter of fact also, is Christianity ever civilization, as far
as its influence prevails; but, unhappily, in matter of fact,
civilization is not necessarily Christianity. If we would view things
as they really are, we must bear in mind that, true as it is, that only
a supernatural grace can raise man towards the perfection of his
nature, yet it is possible,—without the cultivation of its spiritual
part, which contemplates objects subtle, distant, delicate of
apprehension, and slow of operation, nay, even with an actual contempt
of faith and devotion, in comparison of objects tangible and
present,—possible it is, I say, to combine in some sort the other
faculties of man into one, and to progress forward, with the
substitution of natural religion for faith, and a refined expediency or
propriety for true morality, just as with practice a man might manage
to run without an arm or without sight, and as the defect of one organ
is sometimes supplied to a certain extent by the preternatural action
of another.
And this is, in fact, what is commonly understood by civilization,
and it is the sense in which the word must be used here; not that
perfection which nature aims at, and requires, and cannot of itself
reach; but a second-rate perfection of nature, being what it is, and
remaining what it is, without any supernatural principle, only with its
powers of ratiocination, judgment, sagacity, and imagination fully
exercised, and the affections and passions under sufficient control.
Such was it, in its higher excellences, in heathen Greece and Rome,
where the perception of moral principles, possessed by the cultivated
and accomplished intellect, by the mind of Plato or Isocrates, of
Cleanthes, Seneca, Epictetus, or Antoninus, rivalled in outward
pretensions the inspired teaching of the Apostle of the Gentiles. Such
is it at the present day, not only in its reception of the elements of
religion and morals (when Christianity is in the midst of it as an
inexhaustible storehouse for natural reason to borrow from), but
especially in a province peculiar to these times, viz., in science and
art, in physics, in politics, in economics, and mechanics. And great as
are its attainments at present, still, as I have said, we are far from
being able to discern, even in the distance, the limit of its
advancement and of its perfectibility.
4.
It is evident from what has been said, that barbarism is a
principle, not of society, but of isolation; he who will not submit
even to himself, is not likely to volunteer a subjection to others; and
this is more or less the price which, from the nature of the case, the
members of society pay individually for the security of that which they
hold in common. It follows, that no polity can be simply barbarous;
barbarians may indeed combine in small bodies, as they have done in
Gaul, Scythia, and America, from the gregariousness of our nature, from
fellowship of blood, from accidental neighbourhood, or for
self-preservation; but such societies are not bodies or polities; they
are but the chance result of an occasion, and are destitute of a common
life. Barbarism has no individuality, it has no history; quarrels
between neighbouring tribes, grudges, blood-shedding, exhaustion,
raids, success, defeat, the same thing over and over again, this is not
the action of society, nor the subject-matter of narrative; it neither
interests the curiosity, nor leaves any impression on the memory. “
Labitur et labetur;” it forms and breaks again, like the billows of
the sea, and is but a mockery of unity. When I speak of barbarian
states, I mean such as consist of members not simply barbarous, but
just so far removed from the extreme of savageness that they admit of
having certain principles in common, and are able to submit themselves
individually to the system which rises out of those principles; that
they do recognize the ideas of government, property, and law, however
imperfectly; though they still differ from civilized polities in those
main points, which I have set down as analogous to the difference
between brutes and the human species.
As instinct is perfect after its kind at first, and never advances,
whereas the range of the intellect is ever growing, so barbarous states
are pretty much the same from first to last, and this is their
characteristic; and civilized states, on the other hand, though they
have had a barbarian era, are ever advancing further and further from
it, and thus their distinguishing badge is progress. So far my line of
thought leads me to concur in the elaborate remarks on the subject put
forth by the celebrated M. Guizot, in his “Lectures on European
Civilization.” Civilized states are ever developing into a more perfect
organization, and a more exact and more various operation; they are
ever increasing their stock of thoughts and of knowledge: ever
creating, comparing, disposing, and improving. Hence, while bodily
strength is the token of barbarian power, mental ability is the
honourable badge of civilized states. The one is like Ajax, the other
like Ulysses; civilized nations are constructive, barbarous are
destructive. Civilization spreads by the ways of peace, by moral
suasion, by means of literature, the arts, commerce, diplomacy,
institutions; and, though material power never can be superseded, it is
subordinate to the influence of mind. Barbarians can provide themselves
with swift and hardy horses, can sweep over a country, rush on with a
shout, use the steel and firebrand, and frighten and overwhelm the weak
or cowardly; but in the wars of civilized countries, even the
implements of carnage are scientifically constructed, and are
calculated to lessen or supersede it; and a campaign becomes
co-ordinately a tour of savants, or a colonizing expedition, or
a political demonstration. When Sesostris marched through Asia to the
Euxine, he left upon his road monuments of himself, which have not
utterly disappeared even at this day; and the memorials of the rule of
the Pharaohs are still engraved on the rocks of Libya and Arabia.
Alexander, again, in a later age, crossed from Macedonia to Asia with
the disciples of Aristotle in his train. His march was the diffusion of
the arts and commerce, and the acquisition of scientific knowledge; the
countries he passed through were accurately described, as he proceeded,
and the intervals between halt and halt regularly measured.[72] His
naval armaments explored nearly the whole distance from Attock on the
Upper Indus to the Isthmus of Suez: his philosophers noted down the
various productions and beasts of the unknown East; and his courtiers
were the first to report to the western world the singular institutions
of Hindostan.
Again, while Attila boasted that his horse's hoof withered the grass
it trod on, and Zingis could gallop over the site of the cities he had
destroyed, Seleucus, or Ptolemy, or Trajan, covered the range of his
conquests with broad capitals, marts of commerce, noble roads, and
spacious harbours. Lucullus collected a magnificent library in the
East, and Cæsar converted his northern expeditions into an antiquarian
and historical research.
Nor is this an accident in Roman annals. She was a power
pre-eminently military; yet what is her history but the most remarkable
instance of a political development and progress? More than any power,
she was able to accommodate and expand her institutions according to
the circumstances of successive ages, extending her municipal
privileges to the conquered cities, yielding herself to the literature
of Greece, and admitting into her bosom the rites of Egypt and Phrygia.
At length, by an effort of versatility unrivalled in history, she was
able to reverse one main article of her policy, and, as she had already
acknowledged the intellectual supremacy of Greece, so did she humble
herself in a still more striking manner before a religion which she had
persecuted.
5.
If these remarks upon the difference between barbarism and
civilization be in the main correct, they have prepared the way for
answering the question which I have raised concerning the principle of
life and the mode of dissolution proper or natural to barbarous and
civilized powers respectively. Ratiocination and its kindred processes,
which are the necessary instruments of political progress, are, taking
things as we find them, hostile to imagination and auxiliary to sense.
It is true that a St. Thomas can draw out a whole system of theology
from principles impalpable and invisible, and fix upon the mind by pure
reason a vast multitude of facts and truths which have no pretence to a
bodily form. But, taking man as he is, we shall commonly find him
dissatisfied with a demonstrative process from an undemonstrated
premiss, and, when he has once begun to reason, he will seek to prove
the point from which his reasoning starts, as well as that at which it
arrives. Thus he will be forced back from immediate first principles to
others more remote, nor will he be satisfied till he ultimately reaches
those which are as much within his own handling and mastery as the
reasoning apparatus itself. Hence it is that civilized states ever tend
to substitute objects of sense for objects of imagination, as the basis
of their existence. The Pope's political power was greater when Europe
was semi-barbarous; and the divine right of the successors of the
English St. Edward received a death-blow in the philosophy of Bacon and
Locke. At present, I suppose, our own political life, as a nation, lies
in the supremacy of the law; and that again is resolvable into the
internal peace, and protection of life and property, and freedom of the
individual, which are its result; and these I call objects of sense.
For the very same reason, objects of this nature will not constitute
the life of a barbarian community; prudence, foresight, calculation of
consequences do not enter into its range of mental operations; it has
no talent for analysis; it cannot understand expediency; it is
impressed and affected by what is direct and absolute. Religion,
superstition, belief in persons and families, objects, not proveable,
but vivid and imposing, will be the bond which keeps its members
together. I have already alluded to the divinity which in the
imagination of the Huns encircled the hideous form of Attila. Zingis
claimed for himself or his ancestry a miraculous conception, and
received from a prophet, who ascended to heaven, the dominion of the
earth. He called himself the son of God; and when the missionary friars
came to his immediate successor from the Pope, that successor made
answer to them, that it was the Pope's duty to do him homage, as being
earthly lord of all by divine right. It was a similar pretension, I
need hardly say, which was the life of the Mahometan conquests, when
the wild Saracen first issued from the Arabian desert. So, too, in the
other hemisphere, the Caziques of aboriginal America were considered to
be brothers of the Sun, and received religious homage as his
representatives. They spoke as the oracles of the divinity, and claimed
the power of regulating the seasons and the weather at their will. This
was especially the case in Peru; “the whole system of policy,” says
Robertson, “was founded on religion. The Incas appeared, not only as a
legislator, but as the messenger of heaven.”[73] Elsewhere, the divine
virtue has been considered to rest, not on the monarch, but on the code
of laws, which accordingly is the social principle of the nation. The
Celts ascribed their legislation to Mercury;[74] as Lycurgus and Numa
in Sparta and Rome appealed to a divine sanction in behalf of their
respective institutions.
This being the case, imperfect as is the condition of barbarous
states, still what is there to overthrow them? They have a principle of
union congenial to the state of their intellect, and they have not the
ratiocinative habit to scrutinize and invalidate it. Since they admit
of no mental progress, what serves as a bond to-day will be equally
serviceable to-morrow; so that apparently their dissolution cannot come
from themselves. It is true, a barbarous people, possessed of a
beautiful country, may be relaxed in luxury and effeminacy; but such
degeneracy has no obvious tendency to weaken their faith in the objects
in which their political unity consists, though it may render them
defenceless against external attacks. And here indeed lies their real
peril at all times; they are ever vulnerable from without. Thus Sparta,
formed deliberately on a barbarian pattern, remained faithful to it,
without change, without decay, while its intellectual rival was the
victim of successive revolutions. At length its power was broken
externally by the Theban Epaminondas; and by the restoration of
Messenia, the insurrection of the Laconians, and the emancipation of
the Helots. Agesilaus, at the time of its fall, was as good a Spartan
as any of his predecessors. Again, the ancient Empire of the Huns in
Asia is said to have lasted 1,500 years; at length its wanton tyranny
was put an end to by the Chinese King plunging into the Tartar desert,
and thus breaking their power. Thrace, again, a barbarous country,
lasted many centuries, with kings of great vigour, with much external
prosperity, and then succumbed, not to internal revolution, but to the
permanent ascendancy of Rome. Similar too is the instance of Pontus,
and again of Numidia and Mauritania; they may have had great or
accomplished sovereigns, but they have no history, except in the wars
of their conquerors. Great leaders are necessary for the prosperity, as
great enemies for the destruction, of barbarians; they thrive, as they
come to nought, by means of agents external to themselves. So again
Malek Shah died, and his empire fell to pieces. Hence, too, the
unexpected and utter catastrophes which befall barbarous people,
analogous to a violent death, which I have alluded to in speaking of
the sudden rise and fall of Tartar dynasties; for no one can anticipate
results, which, instead of being the slow evolution of political
principles, proceed from the accident of external quarrels and of the
relative condition of rival powers.
6.
Far otherwise is the history of those states, in which the
intellect, not prescription, is recognized as the ultimate authority,
and where the course of time is necessarily accompanied by a
corresponding course of change. Such polities are ever in progress; at
first from worse to better, and then from better to worse. In all human
things there is a maximum of advance, and that maximum is
not an established state of things, but a point in a career. The
cultivation of reason and the spread of knowledge for a time develop
and at length dissipate the elements of political greatness; acting
first as the invaluable ally of public spirit, and then as its
insidious enemy. Barbarian minds remain in the circle of ideas which
sufficed their forefathers; the opinions, principles, and habits which
they inherited, they transmit. They have the prestige of
antiquity and the strength of conservatism; but where thought is
encouraged, too many will think, and will think too much. The sentiment
of sacredness in institutions fades away, and the measure of truth or
expediency is the private judgment of the individual. An endless
variety of opinion is the certain though slow result; no overpowering
majority of judgments is found to decide what is good and what is bad;
political measures become acts of compromise; and at length the common
bond of unity in the state consists in nothing really common, but
simply in the unanimous wish of each member of it to secure his own
interests. Thus the veterans of Sylla, comfortably settled in their
farms, refused to rally round Pompey in his war with Cæsar.[75] Thus
the municipal cities in the provinces refused to unite together in a
later age for the defence of the Empire, then evidently on the way to
dissolution.[76] Selfishness takes the place of loyalty, patriotism,
and faith; parties grow and strengthen themselves; classes and ranks
withdraw from each other more and more; the national energy becomes but
a self-consuming fever, and but enables the constituent parts to be
their own mutual destruction; and at length such union as is necessary
for political life is found to be impossible. Meanwhile corruption of
morals, which is common to all prosperous countries, completes the
internal ruin, and, whether an external enemy appears or not, the
nation can hardly be considered any more a state. It is but like some
old arch, which, when its supports are crumbled away, stands by the
force of cohesion, no one knows how. It dies a natural death, even
though some Alaric or Genseric happens to be at hand to take possession
of the corpse. And centuries before the end comes, patriots may see it
coming, though they cannot tell its hour; and that hour creates
surprise, not because it at length is come, but because it has been so
long delayed.
I have been referring to the decline, as I before spoke of the
progress, of the Romans: the career of that people through twelve
centuries is a drama of sustained interest and equable and majestic
evolution; it has given scope for the most ingenious researches into
its internal history. There one age is the parent of another; the
elements and principles of its political system are brought out into a
variety of powers with mutual relations; external events act and react
with domestic affairs; manners and views change; excess of prosperity
becomes the omen of misfortune to come; till in the words of the poet,
“Suis et ipsa Roma viribus ruit.” For how many philosophical
histories has Greece afforded opportunity! while the constitutional
history of England, as far as it has hitherto gone, is a recognized
subject-matter of scientific and professional teaching. The case is the
same with the history of the medieval Italian cities, of the medieval
Church, and of the Saracenic empire. As regards the last of these
instances, I am not alluding merely to the civil contentions and wars
which took place in it, for such may equally happen to a barbarian
state. Cupidity and ambition are inherent in the nature of man; the
Gauls and British, the tribes of Scythia, the Seljukian Turks,
consisted each of a number of mutually hostile communities or kingdoms.
What is relevant to my purpose in the history of the Saracens is, that
their quarrels often had an intellectual basis, and arose out of their
religion. The white, the green, and the black factions, who severally
reigned at Cordova, Cairo, and Bagdad, excommunicated each other, and
claimed severally to be the successors of Mahomet. Then came the
fanatical innovation of the Carmathians, who pretended to a divine
mission to complete the religion of Mahomet, as Mahomet had completed
Christianity.[77] They relaxed the duties of ablution, fasting, and
pilgrimage; admitted the use of wine, and protested against the worldly
pomp of the Caliphs. They spread their tents along the coast of the
Persian Gulf, and in no long time were able to bring an army of 100,000
men into the field. Ultimately they took up their residence on the
borders of Assyria, Syria, and Egypt. As time went on, and the power of
the Caliphs was still further reduced, religious contention broke out
in Bagdad itself, between the rigid and the lax parties, and the
followers of the Abbassides and of Ali.
If we consult ancient history, the case is the same; the Jews, a
people of progress, were ruined, as appears on the face of Scripture,
by internal causes; they split into sects, Pharisees, Sadducees,
Herodians, Essenes, as soon as the Divine Hand retired from the direct
government of their polity; and they were fighting together in
Jerusalem when the Romans were beleaguering its walls. Nay, even the
disunion, which was a special and divine punishment for their sins, was
fulfilled according to this natural law which I am illustrating; it was
the splendid reign of Solomon, the era of literature, commerce,
opulence, and general prosperity, which was the antecedent of fatal
revolutions. If we turn to civilized nations of an even earlier date,
the case is the same; we are accustomed indeed to associate Chinese and
Egyptians with ideas of perpetual untroubled stability; but a
philosophical historian, whom I shall presently cite, speaks far
otherwise of those times when the intellect was prominently active.
China was for many centuries the seat of a number of petty
principalities, which were limited, not despotic; about 200 years
before our era it became one absolute monarchy. Till then idolatry was
unknown, and the doctrines of Confucius were in honour: the first
Emperor ordered a general burning of books, burning at the same time
between 400 and 500 of the followers of Confucius, and persecuting the
men of letters. A rationalist philosophy succeeded, and this again gave
way to the introduction of the religion of Buddha or Fo, just about the
time of our Lord's Crucifixion. At later periods, in the fifth and in
the thirteenth centuries, the country was divided into two distinct
kingdoms, north and south; and such was its state when Marco Polo
visited it. It has been several times conquered by the Tartars, and it
is a remarkable proof of its civilization, that it has ever obliged
them to adopt its manners, laws, and even language. China, then, has a
distinct and peculiar internal history, and has paid to the full the
penalty which, in the course of centuries, goes along with the
blessings of civilization. “The whole history of China, from beginning
to end,” says Frederic Schlegel, “displays one continued series of
seditions, usurpations, anarchy, changes of dynasty, and other violent
revolutions and catastrophes.”[78]
The history of Egypt tells the same tale; “Civil discord,” he says,
“existed there under various forms. The country itself was often
divided into several kingdoms; and, even when united, we observe a
great conflict of interests between the agricultural province of Upper
Egypt, and the commercial and manufacturing province of the Lower: as,
indeed, a similar clashing of interests is often to be noticed in
modern states. In the period immediately preceding the Persian
conquest, the caste of warriors, or the whole class of nobility, were
decidedly opposed to the monarchs, because they imagined them to
promote too much the power of the priesthood;”—in other words, their
national downfall was not owing directly to an external cause, but to
an internal collision of parties and interests;—“in the same way,”
continues the author I am quoting, “as the history of India presents a
similar rivalry or political hostility between the Brahmins and the
caste of the Cshatriyas. In the reign of Psammatichus, the disaffection
of the native nobility obliged this prince to take Greek soldiers into
his pay; and thus at length was the defence of Egypt entrusted to an
army of foreign mercenaries.” He adds, which is apposite to my purpose,
for I suppose he is speaking of civilized nations, “In general, states
and kingdoms, before they succumb to a foreign conqueror, are, if not
outwardly and visibly, yet secretly and internally, undermined.”
So much on the connexion between the civilization of a state and its
overthrow from internal causes, or, what may be called, its succumbing
to a natural death. I will only add, that I am but attempting to set
down general rules, to which there may be exceptions, explicable or
not. For instance, Venice is one of the most civilized states of the
middle age; but, by a system of jealous and odious tyranny, it
continued to maintain its ground without revolution, when revolutions
were frequent in the other Italian cities; yet the very necessity of so
severe a despotism shows us what would have happened there, if natural
causes had been left to work unimpeded.
7.
I feel I owe you, Gentlemen, an apology for the time I have consumed
in an abstract discussion; it is drawing to an end, but it still
requires the notice of two questions, on which, however, I have not
much to say, even if I would. First, can a civilized state become
barbarian in course of years? and secondly, can a barbarian state ever
become civilized?
As to the former of these questions, considering the human race did
start with society, and did not start with barbarism, and barbarism
exists, we might be inclined at first sight to answer it in the
affirmative; again, since Christianity implies civilization, and is the
recovery of the whole race of Adam, we might answer the second in the
affirmative also; but such resolutions of the inquiry are scarcely to
the point. Doubtless the human race may degenerate, doubtless it may
make progress; doubtless men, viewed as individuals or as members of
races or tribes, or as inhabitants of certain countries, may change
their state from better to worse, or from worse to better: this,
however, is not the question; but whether a given state, which has a
certain political unity, can change the principle of that unity, and,
without breaking up into its component parts, become barbarian instead
of civilized, and civilized instead of barbarian.
(1.) Now as to the latter of these questions, it still must be
answered in the affirmative under circumstances: that is, all civilized
states have started with barbarism, and have gradually in the course of
ages developed into civilization, unless there be any political
community in the world, as China has by some been considered,
representative of Noe; and unless we consider the case of colonies, as
Constantinople or Venice, fairly to form an exception. But the question
is very much altered, when we contemplate a change in one or two
generations from barbarism to civilization. The substitution of one
form of political life for another, when it occurs, is the sort of
process by which fossils take the place of animal substances, or strata
are formed, or carbon is crystallized, or boys grow into men.
Christianity itself has never, I think, suddenly civilized a race;
national habits and opinions cannot be cast off at will without
miracle. Hence the extreme jealousy and irritation of the members of a
state with innovators, who would tamper with what the Greeks called
[Greek: nomima], or constitutional and vital usages. Hence the fury of
Pentheus against the Mænades, and of the Scythians against their King
Scylas, and the agitation created at Athens by the destruction of the
Mercuries. Hence the obstinacy of the Roman statesmen of old, and of
the British constituency now, against the Catholic Church; and the
feeling is so far justified, that projected innovations often turn out,
if not simply nugatory, nothing short of destructive; and though there
is a great notion just now that the British Constitution admits of
being fitted upon every people under heaven, from the Blacks to the
Italians, I do not know what has occurred to give plausibility to the
anticipation. England herself once attempted the costume of
republicanism, but she found that monarchy was part of her political
essence.
(2.) Still less can the possibility be admitted of a civilized
polity really relapsing into barbarism; though a state of things may be
superinduced, which in many of its features may be thought to resemble
it. In truth, I have not yet traced out the ultimate result of those
internal revolutions which I have assigned as the incidental but
certain evils, in the long run, attendant on civilization. That result
is various: sometimes the over-civilized and degenerate people is swept
from the face of the earth, as the Roman populations in Africa by the
Vandals; sometimes it is reduced to servitude, as the Egyptians by the
Ptolemies, or the Greeks by the Turks; sometimes it is absorbed or
included in new political combinations, as the northern Italians by the
Lombards and Franks; sometimes it remains unmolested on its own
territory, and lives by the momentum, or the repute, or the habit, or
the tradition of its former civilization. This last of course is the
only case which bears upon the question I am considering; and I grant
that a state of things does then ensue, which in some of its phenomena
is like barbarism; China is an example in point. No one can deny its
civilization; its diligent care of the soil, its cultivation of silk
and of the tea-tree, its populousness, its canals, its literature, its
court ceremonial, its refinement of manners, its power of persevering
so loyally in its old institutions through so many ages, abundantly
vindicate it from the reproach of barbarism. But at the same time there
are tokens of degeneracy, which are all the stronger for being also
tokens, still more striking than those I have hitherto mentioned, of
its high civilization in times past. It has had for ages the knowledge
of the more recent discoveries and institutions of the West, which have
done so much for Europe, yet it has been unable to use them, the
magnetic needle, gunpowder, and printing. The littleness of the
national character, its self-conceit, and its formality, are further
instances of an effete civilization. They remind the observer vividly
of the picture which history presents to us of the Byzantine Court
before the taking of Constantinople; or, again, of that material
retention of Christian doctrine (to use the theological word), of which
Protestantism in its more orthodox exhibitions, and still more, of
which the Greek schism affords the specimen. Either a state of deadness
and mechanical action, or a restless ebb and flow of opinion and
sentiment, is the symptom of that intellectual exhaustion and
decrepitude, whether in politics or religion, which, if old age be a
second childhood, may in some sense be called barbarism, and of which,
at present, we are respectively reminded in China on the one hand, and
in some southern states of Europe on the other.
These are the principles, whatever modifications they may require,
which, however rudely adumbrated, I trust will suffice to enable me to
contemplate the future of the Ottoman Empire.
FOOTNOTES:
[72] Murray's Asia.
[73] Robertson's America, books vi. and vii.
[74] Univ. Hist. Anc., vol. xvi.
[75] Merivale's Rome, vol. ii.
[76] Guizot's European Civilization.
[77] Gibbon, vol x.
[78] Philosophy of History; Robertson's translation.