hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women, and children have either perished by violence or starvation, or, driven from their homes, are now struggling to keep body and soul together as best they can in misery and desolation, crushed beneath the wheels of the Juggernauth of Progress' their only crime, like that of the poor crossing-sweeper, I think, in 1 one of your own novels, that they did not ' move on.' This is called in modern parlance the civilizing influence of Christianity. At this moment the Russians are pushing roads through their newly-acquired territory toward Kars. I am informed by an intelligent Moslem gentleman who has just arrived from that district, that the effect of their 'civilizing' influence upon the inhabitants of the villages through which these roads pass, is to convert the women into prostitutes and the men into drunkards. No wonder the Mohammedan population is flocking in thousands across the frontier into Turkish territory, abandoning their homes and landed possessions in order to escape the contamination of Anti-Christendom. In these days of steam and electricity, not only has the traveller no eye for the moral virtues of a people, but his æsthetic faculties have become blunted; he regards them only as money-making machines, and he esteems them just in the degree in which they excel in the art of wealth-accumulation. Blinded by a selfish utilitarianism, he can now see only barbarism in a country where the landscape is not obscured by the black smoke of factory-chimneys, and the ear deafened by the scream of the locomotive. For him a people who cling to the manners and customs of a bygone epoch with which their own most glorious traditions are associated have no charm. He sees in a race which still endeavors to follow the faith of their forefathers with simplicity and devotion, nothing but ignorant fanaticism, for he has long since substituted hypocrisy for sincerity in his own belief. He despises a peasantry whose instincts of submission and obedience induce them to suffer rather than rise in revolt against a government which oppresses them, because the head of it is invested in their eyes with a sacred character. He can no longer find anything to admire or to interest in the contrast between the East and West, but everything to condemn; and his only sympathy is with that section of the population in Turkey who, called Christians like himself, like him devote themselves to the study of how much can be made, by fair means or foul, out of their Moslem neighbors. "While I observe that this change has come over the Western traveller of late years—a change which I attribute to the mechanical appliances of the age-a corresponding effect, owing to the same cause, has, I regret to say, been produced upon my own countrymen. A gradual assimilation has been for some time in progress in the East with the habits and customs of the rest of Europe. We are abandoning our distinctive costume, and adapting ourselves to a Western mode of life in many ways. We are becoming lax in the observances of our religion; and it is now the fashion for our women to get their high-heeled boots and bonnets from Paris, and for our youths of good family to go to that city of pleasure, or to one of the large capitals of Europe, for their education. they adopt all the vices of Anti-Christendom, for the attractions of a civilization based upon enlightened selfishness are overpoweringly seductive, and they return without religion of any sort-shallow, sceptical, egoistical, and thoroughly demoralized. It is next to impossible for a Moslem youth, as I myself experienced, to come out of that fire uncontaminated. His religion fits him to live with simple and primitive races, and even to acquire a moral control over them; but he is fascinated and overpowered by the mighty influence of the glamour of the West. He returns to Turkey with his principles thoroughly undermined, and, if he has sufficient ability, adds one to the number of those who misgovern it. Here "The two dominant vices which characterize Anti-Christendom are cupidity and hypocrisy. That which chiefly revolts the Turk in this disguised attack upon the morals of his people, no less than upon the very existence of his empire, is, that it should be made under the pretext of morality, and behind the flimsy veil of humanitarianism. It is in the nature of the religious idea that just in proportion as it was originally penetrated with a divine truth, which has become perverted, does it engender hypocrisy. This was so true of Judaism that when the founder of Christianity came, though himself a Jew, he scorchingly denounced the class which most loudly professed the religion which they profaned. But the Phariseeism which has made war upon Turkey is far more intense in degree than that which he attacked, for the religion which it profanes contains the most divine truth which the world ever received. Mahomet divided the nether world into seven hells, and in the lowest he placed the hypocrites of all religions. I have now carefully examined into many religions, but as none of them demanded so high a standard from its followers as Christianity, there has not been any development of hypocrisy out of them at all corresponding to that which is peculiar to Anti-Christianity. For that reason I am constrained to think that its contributions to the region assigned to hypocrites by the prophet will be out of all proportion to the hypocrites of other religions. humanity, have driven the population to despair, and the authorities to the most cruel excesses in order to repress themand when, in the face of all this most transparent humbug, these Anti-Christian nations arrogate to themselves, on the ground of their superior civilization and morality, the right to impose reform upon Turkey-we neither admit their pretensions, covet their civilization, believe in their good faith, nor respect their morality. "Thus it is that, from first to last, the woes of Turkey have been due to its contact with Anti-Christendom. The race is now paying the penalty for that lust of dominion and power which tempted them in the first instance to cross the Bosphorus. From the day on which the tree. of empire was planted in Europe, the canker, in the shape of the opposing religion, began to gnaw at its roots. When the Christians within had thoroughly eaten out its vitals, they called on the Christians without for assistance; and it is morally impossible that the decayed trunk can much longer withstand their combined efforts. But as I commenced by saying, had the invading Moslems in the first instance converted the entire population to their creed, Turkey might have even now withstood the assaults of In illustration of this, see how the principles of morality and justice are at this moment being hypocritically outraged in Albania, where, on the moral ground that a nationality has an inherent right to the property of its neighbor, if it progress.' Nay, more, it is not imposcan make a claim of similarity of race, a sible that her victorious armies might southern district of the country is to be have overrun Europe, and that the faith forcibly given to Greece; while, in vio- of Islam might have extended over the lation of the same moral principle, a whole of what is now termed the civilized northern district is to be taken from the world. I have often thought how much Albanian nationality, to which by right happier it would have been for Europe, of race it belongs, and violently and and unquestionably for the rest of the against the will of the people, who are in world, had such been the case. That no way consulted as to their fate, is to be wars and national antagonisms would handed over for annexation to the Mon- have continued is doubtless true; but we tenegrins—a race whom the population should have been saved the violent poto be annexed traditionally hate and de- litical and social changes which have retest. sulted from steam and electricity, and have continued to live the simple and primitive life which satisfied the aspirations of our ancestors, and in which they found contentment and happiness, while millions of barbarians would to this day have remained in ignorance of the gigantic vices peculiar to Anti-Christian civilization. The West would then have been spared the terrible consequences which are even now impending, as the inevitable result of an intellectual progress to which there has been no corresponding moral 66 When Anti-Christian nations, sitting in solemn congress, can be guilty of such a prostitution of the most sacred principles in the name of morality, and construct an international code of ethics to be applicable to Turkey alone, and which they would one and all refuse to admit or be controlled by themselves-when we know that the internal corruption, the administrative abuses, and the oppressive misgovernment of the Power which has just made war against us in the name of advance. The persistent violation for eighteen centuries of the great altruistic law propounded and enjoined by the great founder of the Christian religion, must inevitably produce a corresponding catastrophe; and the day is not far distant when modern civilization will find that in its great scientific discoveries and inventions, devised for the purpose of ministering to its own extravagant necessities, it has forged the weapons by which it will itself be destroyed. No better evidence of the truth of this can be found than in the fact that Anti-Christendom alone is menaced with the danger of a great class revolution: already in every so-called Christian country we hear the mutterings of the coming storm, when labor and capital will find themselves arrayed against each other-when rich and poor will meet in deadly antagonism, and the spoilers and the spoiled solve, by means of the most recently invented artillery, the economic problems of modern ' progress.' It is surely a remarkable fact that this struggle between rich and poor is specially reserved for those whose religion inculcates upon them as the highest law the love of their neighbor, and most strongly denounces the love of money. No country which does not bear the name of Christian is thus threatened. Even in Turkey, in spite of its bad government and the many Christians who live in it, socialism, communism, nihilism, internationalism, and all kindred forms of class revolution, are unknown, for the simple reason that Turkey has so far, at least, successfully resisted the influence of Anti-Christian civilization.' "In the degree in which the State depends for its political, commercial, and social well-being and prosperity, not upon a moral but a mechanical basis, is its foundation perilous. When the lifeblood of a nation is its wealth, and the existence of that wealth depends upon the regularity with which railroads and telegraphs perform their functions, it is in the power of a few skilled artisans, by means of a combined operation, to strangle it. Only the other day the engineers and firemen of a few railroads in the United States struck for a week; nearly a thousand men were killed and wounded before the trains could be set running again; millions of dollars' worth of property was destroyed. The con tagion spread to the mines and factories, and had the movement been more skilfully organized the whole country would have been in revolution, and it is impossible to tell what the results might have been. Combinations among the workingclasses are now rendered practicable by rail and wire, which formerly were impossible; and the facilities which exist for secret conspiracy have turned Europe into a slumbering volcano, an eruption of which is rapidly approaching. “Thus it is that the laws of retribution run their course, and that the injuries that Anti-Christendom has inflicted upon the more primitive and simple races of the world, which-under the pretext of civilizing them-it has explored to its own profit, will be amply avenged. Believe me, my dear friend, that it is under no vindictive impulse or spirit of religious intolerance that I write thus on the contrary, though I consider Mussulmans generally to be far more religious than Christians, inasmuch as they practise more conscientiously the teaching of their prophet, I feel that teaching from an ethical point of view to be infinitely inferior to that of Christ. I have written, therefore, without prejudice, in this attempt philosophically to analyze the nature and causes of the collision which has at last culminated between the East and the West, between so-called Christendom and Islam. And I should only be too thankful if it could be proved to me that 1 had done the form of religion you profess, or the nation to which you belong, an injustice. I am far from wishing to insinuate that among Christians, even as Christianity is at present professed and practised, there are not as good men as among nations called heathen and barbarous. I am even prepared to admit there are better-for some struggle to practise the higher virtues of Christianity, not unsuccessfully, considering the manner in which these are conventionally travestied; while others, who reject the popular theology altogether, have risen higher than ordinary modern Christian practice by force of reaction against the hypocrisy and shams by which they are surrounded--but these are in a feeble minority, and unable to affect the popular standard. Such men existed among the Jews at the time of Christ, but they did not prevent Him from denouncing Professor Day, A little gentleman, with soft gray eyes, Whose spectacles had faced the very Sphinx Knew all that Science and the schools could teach, Would cheerfully have given his life for Truth. Pluck'd the bright mantle from the verbal form He often thought, "If I should have a child, If ever life should issue out of mine, I shall uprear it on the gracious food Of Knowledge only. Superstition haunts Dangle the fetish and the crucifix That darken us forever till we die. NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXXI., No. 3 20 No child of mine, if I should have a child, And so he wedded, hoping for a child, She came not trembling, trusting in his strength, Her gentle lord's superiority. Two years they grew together, as two trees The pale Professor (though his eyes were dim) Had never absolutely lived at all. Nay, 'twere as wise, perchance, he thought, to mourn As weep for something which had ne'er achieved Which things are Life itself. The mother moaned; And creeping thence to his laboratory, But comfort came a little later on; |