Still the jealousy of the Queen was not mitigated; for a year and a half later we find the same cause of offence still uppermost. Burghley, indeed, and Robert Cecil, having known Bacon since he was a boy, and being convinced therefore that his explanation was sincere and that his opposition had been that of a free counsellor, not of an antagonist, appear to have been satisfied and to have wished the Queen to advance him-but she still objected (June, 1595) that same "speech in Parliament." So here he had one opportunity more of endeavouring to explain his conduct away if he had wished to do so. But still we have the old story -he had nothing to apologize for. "My hope is, that whereas your Lordship told me her Majesty was somewhat gravelled upon the offence she took at my speech in Parliament, your Lordship's favourable and good word (who hath assured me that for your own part you construe that I spake to the best) will be as a good tide to remove her from that shelf. And it is not unknown to your Lordship that I was the first of the ordinary sort of the Lower House of Parliament that spake for the subsidy; and that which I after spake in difference was but in circumstances of time and manner; which methinks should be no great matter, since there is variety allowed in counsel, as a discord in music, to make it more perfect.' Still, you see, it is in the spirit of justification, not of apology, that he writes. Not a hint that he would do differently another time upon a similar occasion. He cannot admit that he was himself in the wrong; his anxiety is that the Queen may be brought to understand that he was right. And this, so far as I can learn, is the last we hear of the matter.

Now let any man, setting aside any preconceptions he may have formed as to Bacon's character, and all modern notions of the indignity of treating queens with respect, endeavour to interpret naturally these words and actions, and then say whether they indicate anything but simplicity, sincerity, and integrity. Had he been the selfish, crafty, time-serving man that the reviewer takes him for, is it not clear that at each successive step throughout this whole action he would have taken a different. course?

First, on the question of the conference, he would not have divided the House against his own party.

Secondly, he would at least have taken occasion to retract his opinion when he saw a disposition in the whole House to

retract.

Thirdly, on the question of supply (which was the next stage in the business) he would have supported his party instead of again opposing them.

Fourthly, when he found that the Queen (instead of thanking

* L. & L. p. 361.

her stars that she had so able and so honest a man on her side) resented such independence and withdrew her favour, he would have tried to put it to the account of any motive rather than that of imperative duty which left him no other choice, and to give her assurance that hereafter he would be better advised and understand his duty differently.

Upon each and all of which occasions he took a course so directly opposite to that which would naturally have been taken by a time-serving politician, that one might better cite the story as an instance of a man knowingly and deliberately sacrificing what he knew to be his private interest to what he conceived to be his public duty. This, however, would be going further than I mean to go myself. I think it possible enough that in this case he thought his interest and his duty compatible. Out of his great reverence for the character of the Queen, he may well have given her credit for understanding her own interest better than she seems to have done, and valuing a man all the more highly for such independence. His precept addressed more than twenty years after to Buckingham was, "Rather make able and honest men yours than advance those that are otherwise because they are yours;" and he may have hoped that the Queen would act upon this principle. Be it so. Be it that he thought the reputation of honesty a better means of rising than sycophancy. All I contend is, that it was by honesty and not by sycophancy that he was seeking to rise.

As a proof therefore that he was ready to sacrifice "everything," or indeed anything that he ought not, for favour at Court, this fifth instance fails as completely as the rest. And, so far, I can hardly think that there will be any difference of opinion. It will be said, of course, that these are small matters; and I know that they are meant to tell only as the lower steps in the rhetorical ascent. Still they are meant to count as figures in a series which is to produce its effect by accumulation. They derive their value from their place. In arithmetic, a cipher added at the end multiplies the total value by ten. In rhetoric, an item worth nothing, inserted at the beginning, has an effect of the same kind on the imagination. If these instances are allowed to be worth nothing (which I think they must) they ought to be cast out altogether. In another number I will proceed in due order with the others, and if the next seems more to the purpose than these (as no doubt it will to many, having a deep-seated popular prejudice to support it) let it be remembered that it is the first in the list which has proved on examination to be at all to the purpose.

JAMES SPEDDING.

TURKEY.

"WE

E are the best police of the Bosphorus." The words were spoken with emphasis, as a triumphant and conclusive argument. Nothing more could be required by a foreign visitor to justify the Ottoman rule in Constantinople. The speaker had been a medical student in Paris. His metaphors were made up of the jargon of the hospital. To this all-powerful Grand Vizier of Sultan Abd-ul-Assiz, it was a stroke of luck that the Tsar in nicknaming his country should have called it "Sick Man." Fuad Pasha felt doubly at home in talking of his master's empire as a patient. "If you wish to have news of our health," he continued," "it is not advisable to consult that doctor." "I know Turkey better than he [the Tsar], and than any one. I have stethoscoped (auscultée) it back and front. There is no organic malady, but— · pardonnez-moi-we have the itch, and no sulphur at hand."

If Fuad Pasha (whose disciple is now in authority) had an ideal system of government, it was that which a man far greater than he, but with a mind of similar tendencies, had expounded in Les Idées Napoléoniennes. To reconstruct the Caliphate, to reform it into a liberal despotism seated upon the heads of a dumb democracy, this was the thought of the great Minister, with whose death is supposed to have departed the glory of the reign of Abd-ul-Assiz. The recent revolution is explained as a reversion to the policy of Fuad. Midhat Pasha is hailed as the political heir of the ex-medical student of Paris. The new advisers of the

new Sultan will do their best to sustain the opinion, which no doubt they hold, that Turkey is not sick unto death, that, as Fuad said, she has no organic malady. The present writer maintains a contrary opinion, and it is the object of these pages to show that the Turkish Empire has organic disease, and that her incurable malady grows ever more deadly as she is forced by new arterial connections, closer and more closely, into the light of the political ideas and civilization of Western Europe. I shall reduce the pleas for the maintenance of the Turkish Empire to that one plea of expediency upon which the greatest master of Turkish policy, Fuad Pasha, was content to rest its claim-"We are the best police of the Bosphorus"-and I shall show that the validity of this plea is a reproachful testimony to greed and jealousy, and want of true civilization, on the part of the Great Powers of Europe.

The Turkish Power is a Mahommedan theocracy. No law is popularly accepted as valid unless it has religious sanction. The statute-book must run with the Koran. The fetra of the Sheikul-Islam was needed before any could engage in the dethronement of Abd-ul-Assiz. But we have seen in the history of the Empire that the outward manifestation of this theocratic basis can be suppressed wherever it is likely to be offensive. The coordinate authority which the Queen of these realms exercises, by virtue of the Capitulations of 1675, over all who can be called British subjects in Turkey, was "the command" (I quote the words of the Treaty) "of the Emperor and Conqueror of the Earth, achieved with the assistance of the Omnipotent and by the especial Grace of God, We who by Divine Grace, assistance, will, and benevolence, now are the King of Kings of the world, the Prince of Emperors of every age, the Dispenser of Crowns to Monarchs, and the Champion." In less than 200 years a great change was observed in the outward manifestation of the basis of Turkish power in Europe. In the Treaty of 1856 there is no trace of divine authority about the attributes of the Sultan. He is styled simply "Emperor of the Ottomans." This was the work of A'ali and Fuad, the great exemplars of the present time. It is not a final condemnation of the Turkish Power to say that it is theocratic, for this has been the pretence of all powers, and is still the reputed basis of most of the Powers of Europe. In his own dominions, the Tear is just as much "the Shadow of God" as the Sultan. We must look to the ethics of the religion which is the groundwork of power. Mere forms of speech can be changed, and the language of Paris put into the mouth of the Padishah. Had I been blind, I could have fancied myself at the Tuileries on the 10th May, 1868, when, amid hopes not less extravagant than those which now encircle the utterances of Murad V., his ill-fated

predecessor announced the establishment of the Council of State and of the High Court of Justice. He, the successor of Sultans whose pretensions to divine direction had not been less declared than those of the infallible Pope,-he, who was in fact the Pope of the Sooni Mahommedans, confessed that something was wrong, something rotten in his State, because, said the master of greedy Pashas, from his throne in the Sublime Porte, "if the principles and laws already established had answered to the exigencies of our country and of our people, we ought to have found ourselves to-day in the same rank as the most civilized and best-administered States of Europe." With this naïve admission of failure, and "with a view to promote the rights of his subjects," Abd-ulAssiz, the reformer, pronounced the establishment of the Council of State "whose members are taken from all classes of our subjects without exception." "Another body," he continued, "instituted under the name of the High Court of Justice, has been charged to assure justice to our subjects in that which concerns the security of their persons, their honour, and their property."

No Christian could speak more fairly. Men talked and wrote of Abd-ul-Assiz as they now write and talk of Murad, and assumed then as now, that a man whose youth had passed under oppression and surveillance, to whom education had been denied as dangerous, upon whom continence and frugality had been enforced, would, when he acquired unlimited power and wealth, when he could indulge unchecked the favourite weaknesses of the Prophet, be a lover of liberty and law, a wise and liberal statesman, the husband of one wife, the master of no slaves, and in his private expenditure, the delight of anxious bondholders. It is the inveterate error of the West to suppose that in Turkey figs grow from thistles-that beautiful women are produced by a life in rooms from which the glorious eye of the heavens, as well as the sight of man, is excluded; by walking out of doors in veils which prevent every breath of fresh air; in shoes and upon stones which render exercise a torture, and graceful carriage an impossibility; by a life of inanity, ignorance, and indulgence in unwholesome food. The error is not uncommon nor its cause recondite. Our mistake is that of the dramatists of the Restoration, who, Lord Macaulay says, knew not that "drapery was more alluring than exposure." The mystery of the East is our delusion, and this, if we face it closely and fairly, especially if we regard it during moments when in the political struggle its veil is disarranged, is, as we shall see, a cover for evils which prefer darkness rather than light, in social life; a despotism with slavery for a domestic institution, and upon the throne of European Turkey, a misrepresentation founded upon force, upheld by oppression of those