The Sun.
London, England, 1853-09-29 00:00:00

tr N

1,3141:-

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ignoble in map, fraud was fraud, roblierrwaft,m.
murder was murder. It would ntid some, "tilt!
ment to prove that the distinct is, at
present day—in matters of polit-s ,at --16577.:
more ignored by the votaries of Islam, 1...---tetiter
religionists of
Prince Gortschakoff. :• 1 t Sth
41;o
. .

ready to say, with that eminent Christian philanthropist,
" Long life to the god of the Russians !" might possibly
find it neither easy nor agreeable to define the exact
essence and attributes of the, apparently, not immortal
divinity before whom they are prepared to offer the
costly sacrifice of the plain rights of a nation. It is
better to spare them and ourselves such unprofitable
theological efforts, and to resume the moral of all that
has been said, in a short reference to what, as known to
us on the highest authority, is the present state and
probable future of the Ottoman Empire.

Let those whose sympathies with right need more to
rouse them than the reiterated demonstration that it is
right, recall the general drift and bearing of a recent
speech of Lord Palmerston. Let those, too, who, with
every feeling that

" Because right is right, to follow right
Were wisdom, in the seorn of consequence,''
would yet gladly find themselves relieved from the idea
of being bound up in the same cause with a set of unim-
provable barbarians, recall the positive statements of
the same speech in answer to Mr. Cobden. When the
late Foreign Minister gave the sanction of his know-
ledge and judgment to the opinion that the moral and
material condition of Turkey was neither desperate nor
unimprovable—when he flatly contradicted the counter-
assertions of the calumniators of the Porte—when he
finally stated, amid the expressions of a generous satis-
faction on the part of his audience, that in no country
in Europe had greater advances been made than in the
Ottoman Empire within the last thirty years—he gave,
by anticipation, an answer to much that has been since
and recently said—an answer sufficient to convert the
candid, and, it might have been thought, to silence
the cautious, whether candid or not. And, when he
added that, with what may be called fair play on the
part of other Powers--with themere abstinence from open
attack and injury—there was not a doubt of the power of
Turkey, and every hope of her readiness, to continue
to advance, to improve, and gradually regenerate herself
to the point of becoming a fit member of the civilised
community of the world, his declaration led every other
mind to draw the irresistible inference which the states-
man might have scrupled to express. That inevitable
inference was, that such improvement—desired by, and
acceptable to all the rest of the civilised world—was the
one thing feared by that Power whose interest lies in
the continued degradation of Turkey, and which, because
feared, was the true cause of the attack on her inde-
pendence. Russia alone has a continuing interest in the
barbarism which is weakness, for weakness is the road
to subjugation. Therefore is it that, rightly appreciating
the progress of improvement, which may be loss to her,
though gain to all others, she assails it before it be too
strong for her. Hers, and not the Ottoman Porte's, is
the barbarian interest in the matter. True in every
sense, this would be true even in the restricted meaning
which would be given it by the assumption, in itself er-
roneous, that the interests of justice and truth can ever
be separated from or be found in conflict with the proper
interests of civilisation.
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