The Sun.
London, England, 1854-01-30 00:00:00

SIR E. B. LYTTON AND PROGRESS.

(From the Times.)
With the enthusiasm of a poet and the eloquence
of an orator, Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton describes
to the people of Leeds the glories of our civilisation
and the triumphs of our progress. The amusing
novelist and brilliant essayist has recovered appa-
rently from the dream of Protection, and once more
brought his heart and imagination into sympathy
with the destinies of the great majority of his
countrymen ; nay, with the fervour of a convert,
he rushes into the contrary extreme, and devotes
those powers which were lately dedicated to advo-
cate the aggrandisement of a class to proving that
in our estimate of progress and civilization we are
not sufficiently cosmopolitan. Civilisation, as we
understand it, is, he remarks, still confined to
the inhabitants of Western Europe and North
Eastern America. Africa is still the haunt of
savage beasts and still more savage men ; and
Asia remains now, as ever, the prey to stereo-
typed superstition and incorrigible despotisms.
Nay, even those celebrated countries of the
East—the cradles of art, of learning, and of
progress—lie desolate under the hoof of pitiless
oppression, and the very names which recal our
schoolboy enthusiasm are barbarised into unintel-
lible jargon. The more contracted view of this
case would represent our superiority over the
nations of the East of
just
as a matter of exul-
tation, but the more and philanthropic view is
undoubtedly that winch treats this inequality of
advancement as a subject of humiliation, instead of
triumph. If our civilisation had been deeper and
more generally diffused among ourselves, it would
have extended more widely among our neighbours,
and, instead of congratulating ourselves that we
are not as they are, we should have by this time
made their state something more nearly ap-
proaching to our own. Neither can there be any
doubt that we are heavy losers in every way by
this retrograde civilisation. If Russia had more
to lose, if she were more connected by commerce
with the hierarchy of nations, she would be more
careful of imperilling that prosperity of which she
herself would be a participator. If she had any-
thing, however faintly, resembling a free press—if
she had the slighest shadow of a democratic or even
an aristocratic Assembly, where the acts of her
Government might be criticised and the voice of
truth and reason heard, however faintly and im-
perfectly—we should not see her embarked in this
frantic crusade against the rights of man and the
law and opinion of united Europe. - In the present
most lamentable state of foreign affairs we are
paying the penalty of Russian barbarism, of the
ignorance of her clergy, the servility of her nobles,
and the abject bondage and superstition of her
people. But not only are we injured by the retro-
gade state of Russia, we are still more immediately
damaged by the unfortunate condition of Turkey.
The barbarism of Russia would be compara-
tively harmless if it were not by geographical
position,—the accident which determines the
destinies of half-civilised countries,—brought into
contact with civilisation, in some respects in-
ferior even to its own. With a far superior
soil and a far more hospitable climate, embracing
the very finest countries of the earth, and com-
prising within the limits of one empire the heads
of the navigation of the Persian Gulf, the Red
Sea, and the Mediterranean, Turkey in these
splendid territories exists in a lower state of poverty
and desolation than they probably groaned under
when Theseus or Hercules set forth to destroy
monsters and protect oppressed innocence. The
Greek instructed those whom he conquered, the
Roman incorporated them till he was buried under
the mass of his own acquisitions, and the Goth and
the Vandal founded their own rude polity, and
embraced the religion of the conquered. The
Spaniard has been the missionary of Christianity,
and the Englishman the planter of commerce.
The Turk has taught nothing and established
nothing. Thus the backward civilisation of
Russia finds in its immediate proximity a civili-
sation more backward than its own, and the bar-
barous greed and wild ambition of the one country
are provoked by the weakness and desolation
of the other. At present the destiny of the East
is intrusted to men of action, who must answer
to us for the power committed to them, and
bring to reason the overweening despotism of
Russia, but, when this ruder process has
been accomplished, the real difficulties of the
question are only in their commencement. We
cannot civilise Russia, we cannot teach a barbarous.
people that the interests of nations are precisely
measured by, and correlative with, their duties,
and, if Turkey is to be left unimproved, the same
causes which have prompted the present aggres-
sion will secure its renewal at the earliest possible
opportunity. The only final cure of this deep-
seated political malady lies in the regeneration of
Turkey. liVe cannot, we fear, afford to wait till
the Christian inhabitants, thinly scattered as they
are over the land, shall awake to a sense of their
power and their rights. The iron of long ages of
oppression has entered into their souls, and they
cannot rise at once to the conception and the en-
joyment of freedom. The remedy for the existing
state of things seems to lie, not so much in the
transference of dominion froin the one race to the
other, as in the introduction of some third element
which may control and amalgamate them both.
Turkey is a desolate land, and the appropriate
remedy for such a state of desolation in Turkey,
as elsewhere, seems to consist in colonization. Sup-
pose Turkey were at this moment a part of the Ame-
rican Union, who can doubt that her resources would
be developed, her wilds peopled, and her cities filled
with a peculiar kind of civilisation, and that a few
years of such energetic administration would raise
up a bulwark between the Pruth and the 2Egean
which all the gold, and all the force, and all the
diplomacy of Russia would be unable to pass ? In
this direction we believe our efforts must be em-
ployed, if we mean to put an end to those endless
enterprises which have disturbed the peace of
Europe for the last hundred years. Let the
Powers of Europe, when the one selfish aggressor
has been repelled, demand from Turkey a system
of law which shall give perfect social equality and
freedom from arbitrary punishment and taxation
to any Christian population which may settle in
the land, and break through that miserable system
which renders it almost impossible for a foreigner
to have any interest in Turkish soil. Let them,
in fact, remove all the obstacles which now pre-
vent Turkey from being the field for European colo-
nisation, and we are much mistaken if in a few
years her fertile soil and delicious climate do not
attract swarms of settlers utterly intractable to
the overtures and cajoleries of Russia, and able to
to defend by their valour and wisdom the lands
Which they shall have cultivated and reclaimed by
their industry.

THE EASTERN QUESTION.

(From the Morning Chronicle.)

The Russian answer to the final proposals for
peace may be hourly expected, unless it has been
designedly delayed. A frank acceptance of the
liberal terms offered by Turkey would, even at this
moment, obviate the necessity for hostilities ; nor,
in that case, would the presence of the allied fleets
in the Black Sea cause any serious impediment to
the renewal of friendly relations. The neutrality
of which the Emperor Nicholas requires an assur-
ance would begin to exist from the moment at
which the preliminaries of a Congress should have
been arranged ; and it would then be unnecessary
to institute any retrospective inquiry into the pre-
vious intentions of the Western Powers. Unfor-
tunately, however, there is little reason to hope for
so simple and satisfactory a termination of the
present crisis. Even Count Orloff's mission affords
a sufficient indication of the determination of
Russia to refuse the proposals of the Four Powers.
It would not have been worth while to employ so
important a personage for the mere purpose o ctono-f
veying the assent of his Court to the projec
pacification.
If the acceptance of the terms offered by the
Conference would render the discussuon as to the
maritime armistice superfluous, it is evident, on
the other hand, that no advantage can arise from
engaging in this incidental controversy, until some
progress has been
made in the settlement of the
principal question.
The fleets occupy the Black
Sea for the purpose of protecting the Porte
langams
any such attack as that which resulted
The curiosity of the ins
disaster of Sinope. Emperor
as to their present destination may be satisfied by
the consideration that, if the movement had
taken place at an earlier period, Admiral Nachi-
moff and his squadron would have been cap-
tured or sunk before they could have returned to
Sebastopol. If such a measure, or preparation for
such a measure, be consistent with neutrality, then
England and France may be held to be altogether
neutral between Russia and Turkey. The official
questions which Baron BIIITIOW and M. de Kisse-
leff have been directed to ask may have been in-
tended for the purpose of gaining time • but the
answer of the allied powers, as indicated by our
Paris correspondent in his letter of Saturday even-
ing, will be so very far from agreeable to the Czar,
that it may not improbably serve to precipitate a
rupture, and lead to the withdrawal of the respec-
tive ambassadors from London and Paris—espe-
cially as the last accounts from St. Petersburg state
that, in the absence of " satisfactory explanations,"
the Emperor had resolved upon extreme measures.
It is worth remarking, however, that the Imperial
inquiry respecting the intentions of the allied fleets
involves the first diplomatic concession which has
been made by Russia during the recent transac-
tions, The western powers have repeatedly been