The Sun.
London, England, 1867-01-01 00:00:00

The Eastern Question.

Gen. Garibaldi has addressed the following latter
upon the Eastern question to a friend near London :
" Caprera, Dec. 18, 1866.

" That I love England with the affection of a son
you cannot doubt, and that it is ever the desire of
my heart to see her in the first rank among nations
is equally certain, but to caress the errors of her
Ministers—to that I cannot lend myself. I repeat,
therefore, to your statesmen that which I 'have
stated to our own—Do well, and you will receive
praise; but to lavish praise on those who do evil is
servile adulation, and I never flatter. In the war of
giants waged by England against the First Empe-
ror, I search in the pages of those histories of your
country which narrate it for one single expression of
condemnation at the expenditure of millions of lives
and millions of money; sacrificed to combat one de-
spotism, indeed, but certainly to sustain another
not less exacting. Who, however, on the other
hand, will not confess, with me, that the services
rendered by England to the cause of human progress
have been immense ? And I in particular bear tes-
timony to the benefits received from you by Italy
in 1830, without which we should nut now be ex-
ulting in the embrace of every member of the Italian
family. But when I see the Government of this my
adopted country allied with Austria and with Tur-
key, I must tell you the truth—namely, that I inhale
the fumes of a charnel-house, which all the national
vitality may be unable to dispel, if Great Britain
places herself in contact with these dead corpses.
I would rather see her using her power and her in-
fluence to support those oppressed nationalities
at present going to decay in the putrid atmo-
sphere of despotism, but who, remaining constant
to their desire of elevating themselves, must certainly
rise one day or another to their natural places in the
fraternity of free nations.
" Let us leave Austria, whose Emperor ought to
receive the fate of his brother Emperor of Mexico,
and which exists only through the dissensions of the
nationalities checkmating each other's efforts to-
wards emancipation.
" Let us travel to Turkey, cosmopolitan as I am,
and a believer in that God who desires not factions
and discords, but, on the contrary, that men should
love each other as brethren (which fraternisation
can only be possible, however, when we send the
Dervish to the spade and the Romish priest to
the mattock). Believing fully all this, I can make
no difference between the natives of the plains of
Tartar), and my countrymen born on the sunny hills
of Rome.

" But have you any idea what this despotism of
the Turks protested against by you really is? I will
give you an example.
" One day, in the port of Olivieri, in the island
of Mitylene, I inquired of a Greek peasant the rea-
son why he did not gather up the olives, instead of
permitting them to perish on the ground. Be-
cause,' he answered, ' the Pasha buys up all the
olives, and we are compelled to deliver them to him
at such a low price that it would not pay the ex-
pense of gathering them in.'
" Behold how the interest of this poor remnant of
Christians is neglected in temporal 'natters ; and for
the rest, and for all that concerns the prostitution
of the body and of the soul, how am I to relate it
to you, who have so kind a heart and who have a
sou and daughters? It is most horrible. And if I
do not speak of it, oh ! forgive me ; it is for the sake
of decency, and from the respect which I ONVC you,
that I cannot detail to you such brutalities.
" Well, now I have laid before you the condition
of the Christians under Islam, and Britain—the
classic ground of human rights, the protectress of
the oppressed, the emancipatress of the slave—per
sists in upholding these fruits of a despotism the
most inhuman and the most monstrous.
"In 1827 England, France, and Russia, in one
of those outbursts of generosity which God some-
times excites in great minds, accomplished one of
those facts which in the history of nations are fol-
lowed by universal gratitude. Let them complete
the sublime task, let them spare to humanity a fresh
torrent of blood, and they will receive from her a
thousand benedictions.
G. GARIBALDI."