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 ox THE 
 
 MUSCOVITE CEUSADE 
 
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 NOTE 
 
 OF 
 
 AN ENGLISH REPUBLICAN 
 
 ON THE 
 
 MUSCOVITE CRUSADE. 
 
 BY 
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 
 
 ' Non tali auxilio, nee defensoribus istia 
 Tempus eget.' VIEO. Mn. ii. 521. 
 
 CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY. 
 
 1876.
 
 LOXDOX : riiixTF.D BY 
 
 SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., XEW-STRF.F.T SQUATIE 
 AXD r.VBLlAilEST ST11EET
 
 AMID and above the many voices now jangling around 
 what is called the Eastern Question, the sound of one 
 voice like the blast of a trumpet has at length rung 
 its message in all English ears after a sufficiently 
 well-known fashion to a sufficiently unmistakable 
 purport. A preacher who defends the gallows, an 
 apostle who approves the lash, has lifted up his voice 
 against oppression, and has cursed ' the unspeakable 
 Turk ' by all his gods : in the name of Francia and 
 in the name of Mouravieff the champion of Eyre 
 Pasha in Jamaica has uttered his sonorous note of 
 protest against the misdeeds of Achmet Aga in Bul- 
 garia. For all sincere and lifelong admirers of the 
 greatest English writer now living among us in an 
 old age more peaceful though not more noble than 
 was granted to the one Englishman we can remember 
 yet greater in genius and in heart than he, it must be 
 no small satisfaction, though it cannot but be no 
 small surprise, to discover that there is actually 
 
 A 2
 
 4 NOTE OF AN ENGLISH REPUBLICAN 
 
 some limit, however indefinable, to Mr. Carlyle's ad- 
 miration of the strongest hand. But why the single 
 exception which is to prove the else universal rule 
 should be that particular instance which apparently 
 it is, we may surely be permitted in all loyalty and 
 humility to inquire. What is the peculiar sanctify- 
 ing quality in the Bulgarian which is to exempt him 
 at need from the good offices of ' beneficent whip ' 
 and ' portable gallows,' as from things insupportable 
 and maleficent to him alone of human kind ? What 
 tie can it be which binds together such allies as Mr. 
 Gladstone and Mr. Carlyle on a question of political 
 philanthropy ? Misery, we all know, makes strange 
 bedfellows ; but there would seem to be sympathies, 
 religious or political, which bring stranger matches 
 about than ever were made by misery. Is it a com- 
 mon love of liberty which links the veteran of letters 
 to the veteran of politics ? In this very epistle 
 published by the Times of November 28 we see that 
 the new champion of oppressed Christendom cannot 
 resist the overwhelming temptation to turn aside and 
 spit on the very name of liberty ' divine freedom, &c.' 
 His innate loathing of the mere word is too rabid and 
 ungovernable an appetite to be suppressed or disguised 
 for an instant. And yet it is not of conceding to 
 their subjects too much of that mortal poison, of that 
 damnable dissolvent, that the Turks now stand ac- 
 cused. Their Bashi-Bazouks are shamefully and in- 
 credibly maligned if they have earned no right to claim 
 fellowship with the torturers, the hangmen, and the 
 women-whippers of Hungary, of Poland, and of
 
 ON THE MUSCOVITE CRUSADE. 
 
 Jamaica. AVhat then can Mr. Carlyle see in them 
 deserving thus far of his reprobation, or undeserving 
 thus far of his applause ? For we all remember 
 what largesse of full-mouthed obloquy, what wealth 
 of free-handed disdain, was lavished from a quarter 
 so fruitful of perennial insult on the ' small loud group 
 or knot of rabid Nigger- Philanthropists, barking 
 furiously in the gutter,' and headed by John Stuart 
 31111, who ventured to question the excellence of 
 such now discredited methods of government as were 
 applied not long since to his victims by a satrap 
 of English birth. It cannot be tyranny, it cannot 
 be torture, it cannot be massacre to which Mr. Carlyle 
 now objects. His daring has always [approved it- 
 self as great as even his genius, as unquestionable 
 as even his honesty; but there is a point at which 
 daring, like all other human qualities, loses its 
 virtue and changes its likeness and foregoes its 
 name. And the repudiation in any one case of a 
 principle avowed as righteous and cherished as sacred 
 in every case but one is usually and naturally con- 
 sidered as evidence of a quality which cannot ac- 
 curately be denned as mere daring. We cannot 
 therefore insult the great age and the great character 
 of Mr. Carlyle by the supposition that he could now 
 desire to come forward at the long last as a preacher 
 of philanthropy or mercy, as a pleader for the laws of 
 equity or the rights of man, as a champion of all 
 things or of any one thing which it has been a 
 main object of his lifelong energy to denounce alike 
 in the rare moments of its triumph and through the
 
 C NOTE OF AN ENGLISH REPUBLICAN 
 
 prolonged years of its defeat. For so much at least 
 the sternest republican must concede to this illus- 
 trious enemy of all freedom ; that he has not hated 
 it only when unsuccessful, nor reviled it only when 
 out of fashion. Liberty and justice, equality and 
 equity, fraternity and mercy, have had but few 
 enemies in our day for whom as much can honestly 
 be said. This credit is Mr. Carlyle's ; hoc habeat 
 secum, servetque sepulchro. It is not only on truth in 
 the hour of its overthrow that he has ever sought to 
 set his heel. No man has a right to suspect him of 
 even a partial or a passing apostasy from the great 
 consistent principle of his prophecies and his gospel. 
 He has always hated the very thought of liberty, 
 abhorred the very notion of equality, abjured the 
 very idea of fraternity, as he hates, abhors, and 
 abjures them now. No man can doubt on which side 
 or to what effect his potent voice would have been 
 lifted at its utmost pitch before the throne of Herod 
 or the judgment- seat of Pilate. No tetrarch or pro- 
 consul, no Mouravieff. or Eyre of them all, would 
 have been swifter to inflict or louder to invoke the 
 sentence of beneficent whip, the doom of beneficent 
 gallows, on the communist and stump -orator of 
 Nazareth. Had there but lived and written under 
 the shadow of the not as yet divine emperor Tiberius, 
 doubtless as ' strictly honest and just a man ' as any 
 ' present Czar ' or emperor of his kind, a pamphleteer 
 as eloquent and as ardent an imperialist as these 
 pitiful times of ' ballot-box, divine freedom, &c.' have 
 brought forth even ' in this distracted country,' what
 
 .V THE MUSCOVITE CRUSADE. 
 
 a Latter-day Pamphlet on the Crucifixion, what an 
 Occasional Discourse on the Nazarene Question, might 
 we not now possess, whereby to lighten the darkness 
 of history and adjust the balance of judgment! To 
 the regretful disciple of Mr. Carlyle, considering duly 
 of this matter, it must seem wellnigh as though 
 nature were sparing of her greatest men at the right 
 time, and again were lavish at the wrong. Happily, 
 however, it can be no hard task, for any disciple that 
 way given, to reconstruct in fancy from the many 
 models before him the perfect scheme and argument 
 of such possible pamphlet or discourse. For if ever 
 a life was lived on earth, if ever a word was preached, 
 if ever a death was died, most utterly in all points 
 deserving of abhorrence from all who abhor the 
 thought of freedom, of contempt from all who con- 
 temn the notion of equality, of hatred from all who 
 hate the name of brotherhood, that life was assuredly 
 the life, that word was the Gospel, that death was the 
 death of Jesus. It cannot be therefore in his most 
 undeserving name that we hear this protest on behalf 
 of suffering Christians put forth by the worshipper 
 of every gallows on earth but one and that one the 
 cross of Christ. 
 
 We may then presumably be permitted to dismiss 
 without further discussion any possible theory of Chris- 
 tian sympathy with Christians on the part of a preacher 
 to whom the spirit of every saying yet fathered on 
 the Founder of Christianity should seem incompa- 
 rably more hateful and contemptible than ever did 
 the letter of any to Diderot or Voltaire. And with
 
 8 NOTE OF AN ENGLISH REPUBLICAN 
 
 it we may joyfully discard any possible apprehension 
 of seeing a catechumen of his years and antecedents 
 received at the eleventh hour into the fold or vine- 
 yard of the Eastern Church ; a sight which could be 
 profitable for edification to no mortal. Is it then in 
 the mere secular name of mercy or of chivalry, of 
 decency or of manhood, that ' the unspeakable Turk 
 should be immediately struck out of the question ' to 
 make room for the unspeakable Muscovite ? Xay, 
 for very shame, in Shakespeare's phrase, if aught 
 so despicable as the phrase of a mere poet and player 
 may here be cited without offence, 'for godly 
 shame ' it cannot be on any such plea as this that 
 the sympathy or the indignation of any creature is 
 now invoked by the patron of Eyre Pasha, the 
 champion of Mouravieff Bey. Not all English- 
 men have yet forgotten the horror of shame, the 
 sickness of disgust, with which they learnt how 
 the accomplices and the satellites of the former had 
 devised and carried out such ultra-Bulgarian atroci- 
 ties as the stripping and whipping of women by 
 men in public with scourges of ' pianoforte wire.' It 
 was the infliction of such tortures and such outrages 
 as these by English Bashi-Bazouks, that set those to 
 whom the honour of humanity and of England was 
 more than a mockery and a byword ' barking furiously 
 in the gutter ' under the guidance of the best and 
 wisest among English philosophers and statesmen ; 
 and this also it was which evoked the vociferous 
 acclamations and inflamed the tempestuous applause 
 of Mr. Carlyle and his tail. ~\Ye must not therefore
 
 ^V THE MUSCOVITE CRUSADE. 
 
 now insult him by the imputation of a tardy apostasy 
 from, the persistent principles of his life. We must 
 not assume that some afterthought has brought over 
 from the natural side of his sympathy and his service 
 a pervert so illustrious as the prophet who long since 
 denounced * the soft quality of mercy ' as ' thrice 
 accursed ' in all cases where it was not ' permissible,' 
 and who in the same breath referred the question of 
 when and where, if ever, it might be, to the ulti- 
 mate and indisputable decision of a drunken mur- 
 derer and of a whipper of women. Nor, again, unless 
 the meaning of words can be juggled into its 
 exact reverse by the most able arid audacious 
 of special pleaders, can it be out of respect for ' the 
 hard quality of justice ' that the adoring biographer 
 of Frederic William would imprecate our execration 
 on the Turk. For in this very instance of judicial 
 murder he admits, with quaint and admirable candour, 
 that the royal hangman was indeed a mere assassin 
 of the innocent, his ' poor old ' victim being afterwards 
 proved to have been wholly and demonstrably, morally 
 and legally, guiltless of the charge on which he was 
 murdered. Really it grows more and more difficult 
 for the sharpest eye of the most devout disciple to 
 detect whereabouts in the prophetic mind of the North 
 British evangelist he may discern the exact point at 
 which tyranny or cruelty, torture or murder, violence 
 or injustice, ceases to be something admirable and is 
 transmuted as by witchcraft into something unspeak- 
 able. Cruelty in Ireland, cruelty in Jamaica, cruelty 
 in the plantation, cruelty in the jail, each of these in 
 
 A 3
 
 10 NOTE OF AN ENGLISH REPUBLICAN 
 
 turn has naturally provoked the stigmatic brand of 
 his approbation, each in turn has deservedly incurred 
 the indelible condemnation of his praise. 
 
 Is it then to the anarchy, the lack of ' rhythmic 
 drill,' the prevalence of democratic principles and the 
 insurrection of republican ideas, that he objects as to 
 a dominant and perceptible element of evil and of 
 danger among the soldiers of the unspeakable Turk? 
 But never, if we may take the word of all who have 
 fought beside and all who have fought against them, 
 were there better soldiers upon earth ; never men 
 more loyal to their flag, more patient and faithful and 
 laborious, more impermeable in wartime to any breath 
 of insubordination, more impenetrable on campaign 
 by any suggestion of revolt ; no, not among the Bashi- 
 Bazouks let loose by a strictly honest Czar on Khiva 
 or Poland or Circassia. That unlucky word ' honest,' 
 I may remark by the way, has always, when applied 
 to emperors or kings, a perilous tendency to remind 
 his idle admirers with which in particular among all 
 the fantastic creatures of his unprofitable brain this 
 especial epithet was associated by the author of Othello. 
 
 It could not be therefore because the Turk is 
 cruel, though he were seventy times seven times as 
 cruel as he is it cannot be because he is insubordi- 
 nate in wartime, for insubordinatein war time he is 
 not that we are invited on such authority as this 
 to gather grapes of Russian thorns or figs of Pan- 
 slavistic thistles. It is simply, to all appearance, 
 because the Russians ' in our own time have done 
 signal service to God and man in drilling into order
 
 ON THE M USCO VITE CR USADR 11 
 
 and peace anarchic populations all over their side of 
 the world.' To what manner of God and what type 
 of man, if there be any reader that remembers not, 
 yet Hungary remembers and Poland knows ; to the 
 God of the worshippers of Moloch, and to men of the 
 kindred of his priests. But in this case, when ' the 
 Czar, whose serious task it is to protect the Christian 
 subjects in Turkey proper,' shall practically have 
 established his most righteous ' claim to territorial 
 footing in the recovered country,' then ' the peaceful 
 Mongol inhabitants ' will { of course be left in peace, 
 and treated with perfect equity, and even friendly 
 consideration.' Of course they will : about this at 
 least there can be no debate possible among honest 
 men men as strictly ' honest and just, who have such 
 noble sense of their friends' wrongs,' as even Czar 
 Alexander and Ancient lago themselves. The man 
 who could doubt this might be capable of doubting 
 the sacred word of an emperor or the plighted honour 
 of a king. Seriously let me ask, for what imaginable 
 or imaginary class of readers can such a sentence as 
 this be written ? Mr. Carlyle has shewn himself always 
 the greatest and sometimes the uncleanliest of all great 
 English humourists since Swift ; but the gravely in- 
 decent irony of this hideous jest might have discon- 
 certed Aristophanes and made Rabelais think twice. 
 If then we are to cast in our lot on either side in 
 this proposed crusade, we need surely to consider the 
 blazon on the shield of its leader, the watchword on 
 its preacher's lips. It is certainly not from the 
 very humblest follower or obscurest private in the
 
 1-2 NOTE OF AN ENGLISH REPUBLICAN 
 
 republican camp of Europe that any word of protest 
 should now or ever be expected against the heading 
 of a forlorn hope, the preaching of a sacred war, the 
 undertaking of a Quixotic enterprise. But even such 
 an one may be permitted to enter his poor protest 
 against the claims of a crusade which has Alexander 
 of Russia for its Godfrey of Bouillon, and Thomas 
 Carlyle for its Peter the Hermit. Even ' a rascally 
 yea forsooth knave,' like the mercer who had 
 the honour of supplying the sartorial needs of 
 Sir John Falstaff, when that gallant gentleman 
 would fain have been able to subscribe himself 
 resartus, had apparently some right and some reason 
 on his side in desiring that the knight ' should pro- 
 cure him better assurance than Bardolph.' I am of 
 one mind in this matter with the worthy Master 
 Dumbledon : I will not take the Czar's bond and his 
 prophet's ; I like not the security. Even the patron- 
 age of Mistress Tearsheet, I remember, was not 
 ultimately sufficient of itself to vindicate the fair 
 fame of Hostess Quickly's establishment from the 
 suspicions and imputations of evil-minded men : and 
 neither the prophet nor the Czar, to say the very least 
 and speak with all due reverence, has in any matter of 
 politics more than character enough for himself : it 
 would be well indeed if both between them had 
 enough or but half enough for one. What moves 
 the second Godfrey to his chivalrous emprise we 
 know ; but would fain know likewise what it may 
 be that now has touched the lips of our latter-day 
 Peter as with a coal of fire from the altar. Some-
 
 ON THE MUSCOVITE CRUSADE. 13 
 
 thing there must be in those south-eastern popula- 
 tions of Europe which has power to excite sympathy 
 and pity where they never were enkindled before.* 
 Nations and hosts enough of gallant and righteous 
 and blameless men during the justly honoured 
 length of Mr. Carlyle's lifetime have fought and 
 suffered for the right ; have given all that man 
 could give for it, dared all that man could dare, 
 done all that man could do, borne all that man could 
 suffer. Yet he who has now so many words and 
 so loud to speak on behalf of Bulgaria had never a 
 word of help, had never a word but of scorn, for Paris 
 or for Hungary or for Poland ; for Italy he never 
 had a word. That nation or that province, were it 
 never so abject or so wretched, should be proud for 
 once and happy, which has kindled in the spirit of 
 a man so famous and so strangely strong of heart 
 its one solitary spark of impersonal compassion ; if 
 
 * I cannot help remarking for yet another example that it is at 
 least amusing to find, as on December 4th in Birmingham, (for the 
 first time, so to speak, of his appearance in such a part on any boards) 
 John Bright applauding the policy of Richard Plantagenet and 
 crusaders in general with all the incomparable vigour of his tongue. 
 ' Perish Savoy ' by all means, but long live Bulgaria ! There is at 
 last perceptible one singular and solitary bond of sympathy or 
 union between the two living Englishmen of high genius and 
 noble character our greatest speaker and our greatest writer (of 
 whom, by the way, the latter has ere now, in his abhorrence of all talk, 
 proposed in the interests of genuine work and sound philanthropy 
 to cut out at birth all the tongues of some ' one blessed generation ') 
 whose else widely divergent views of national policy with regard to 
 all questions of alliance or fellow-feeling with other nations must be, 
 to speak out the pure plain truth, equally and otherwise incomparably 
 detestable to those in whose political creed I put my only faith and 
 hope on any point of national honour or international action.
 
 14 NOTE OF AN ENGLISH REPUBLICAN 
 
 at least it be matter for happiness or pride to have 
 moved for the first time, and probably for the last, 
 a great man's heart, which (how wide and warm 
 soever it might lie open to its several friends) was 
 barred and locked and straitened and frozen as with 
 threefold ice or triple steel against every touch of the 
 passion for humanity, every breath of the suffering 
 with all unknown who suffer in the world, which 
 binds together all great men of whose genius is akin 
 to loving-kindness and twinborn with mercy, from 
 Jesus even onwards to Mazzini, and from Shelley 
 even backwards to St. John. 
 
 Such other men as these we have had with us, 
 and one at least of the mightiest and most beneficent 
 among them abides on earth even to this day. In 
 writing these words I have written as it were at full 
 length the name of Victor Hugo. The one living 
 man of genius in all ways unquestionably and im- 
 measurably greater than Mr. Carlyle's is also the 
 one living man who above all others has a right to 
 speak in the name of 'mercy, which our greatest man 
 of genius has perpetually denounced in his capacity 
 as politician, of justice which in his capacity as histo- 
 rian he has occasionally defied. It is not with hands 
 yet hot from applauding atrocities in the West that 
 our living lord of song would point men's attention 
 towards atrocities in the East ; it is not with a tongue 
 yet quivering from the praises of tyranny in the North 
 that he would invoke men's indignation upon tyranny 
 in the South. He did not watch with pleased indiffer* 
 ence or tacit assent the assassination of Hungary by
 
 ON THE MUSCOVITE CRUSADE. 15 
 
 Russia, the murder of Rome by France.* If he should 
 now speak on this matter, it would be that he has 
 some right to speak ; and if we should give ear to 
 him, it would be that we have some reason. Not from 
 his mouth of gold need we fear to receive a message 
 that would bid us cast out the devils of Ottoman 
 misrule by the 'Muscovite Beelzebub, the prince of 
 the devils of despotism. There are yet men who 
 have a right though, alas, there may now be no 
 nation which can claim it to speak without rebuke 
 words of justice and of mercy, to be heard without 
 reminder or appeal. But not of these, unhappily and 
 shamefully for us all, is the first living writer of 
 England. The best comfort we can take in this evil 
 case is to remember that the same charge cannot be 
 
 * Witness to all time, for one singly sufficient instance among 
 ten thousand, these words of most bitter and imperishable sweet- 
 ness : 
 
 Et ces deux soeurs, helas ! nos meres toutea deux, 
 
 Rome qu'en pleurs je nomine, 
 Et la France sur qui, raffinement hideux, 
 Coule le sang de Eome ! 
 
 Les Chdtiments, v. 10. (Jersey, Jan. 1853.) 
 
 The villanous enterprise which replaced Pius IX. on the seat of 
 Alexander VI. might surely, one would think, if anything couM on 
 earth, have provoked some indignant word of protest from the 
 great Protestant historian who has inherited as by a right diviner 
 than that of kings so much of the eloquence and the humour, the 
 principles and the passions, of Knox ; but I have never heard that 
 he found in the trumpet of his prophecy one note of inherited 
 indignation to sound against the violator of all national and human 
 right 
 
 Qui, pour la mettre en croix, livra, sbire cruel, 
 
 Borne republicaine a Kome catholique. 
 
 Ibid. vi. 11.
 
 16 NOTE OF AN ENGLISH REPUBLICAN 
 
 brought by the maddest among malignants against 
 the first living writer of the world. 
 
 Time was when England herself might have 
 claimed and approved her claim to this noblest of 
 human rights: when to establish it she had but to 
 speak as a Republic through the lips of a republican 
 secretary of state, whose name in eternity was John 
 Milton. ' Inutilite des poetes,' as the living master 
 of them all has pertinently remarked. But the hard- 
 working and high-minded biographer of our Pro- 
 tector can shew no sign or birthmark of spiritual 
 kinship, as to her loftiest and most precious quality, 
 with the England of that deathless day. All men 
 know with what a noble love and reverence he has 
 paid a good man's homage and done a great man's 
 service to the memories and the names of John Knox 
 and Oliver Cromwell. But no man who has eyes 
 can doubt, and no man who has honesty can deny, 
 that had he lived in such an age as theirs, his natural 
 place, by every law of logic and of likelihood, 
 would hardly have been found beside such men as 
 these. For these in their time were the champions of 
 change and progress, lovers of all the light then 
 possible to them, men of revolution and advance 
 towards new stages of thought and government; 
 more helpful servants of freedom than they knew, 
 and furtherers of a truth more fruitful than they 
 conceived: but the place of a latter-day Puritan, 
 how strong soever be his genius, would assuredly 
 in their age have been a seat of state or office 
 beside or beneath Archbishop Laud or Cardinal
 
 ON THE MUSCOVITE CRUSADE. 17 
 
 Beaton. But the men of that old revolution, we 
 shall be assured, were no mutinous anarchical con- 
 spirators, no blasphemous chaotic rioters, no fitting 
 heads or members for such secret societies as were 
 extinguished in Italy by the godlike advent and 
 heroic genius of Mazzini, and as are alleged to be at 
 this moment engaged in the sure and steady business 
 of undermining all the huge honeycombed fabric of 
 happy and holy Russia. And doubtless in very deed 
 they were not; but surely in their time, on the lips of 
 all men of order and all partisans of reaction, the 
 very best of them and the very wisest was all this 
 and much more. Again, Mr. Carlyle has assuredly 
 never taken part with treason, never ranged himself 
 on the side of a falsehood; the rascal who should 
 assert it would lie like the dastard he must be. 
 We may all of us for example thank heaven, if 
 we will, that in any case the greatest among all 
 our living writers is as wholly and as nobly pure 
 as any republican in Europe from the scandal 
 of having ever burnt so much as one grain of 
 incense on the altars of Thersites Tyrannus, the 
 misshapen counterfeit and misnamed parodist as in 
 burlesque of a mightier malefactor, the one anarch of 
 our time who might most properly have echoed the 
 proud vaunt of his bestial brother in Shakespeare 
 ' I am a bastard begot, bastard instructed, bastard 
 in mind, bastard in valour, in everything illegitimate ; ' 
 Judas on the throne of Nero, Perinet Leclerc in the 
 saddle of Jeanne Dare as saviour of French society 
 and Messiah of Parisian order. But not one of us
 
 18 NOTE OF AN ENGLISH REPUBLICAN 
 
 can reasonably say that Mr. Carlyle has even as fair 
 a claim to speak against any wrongdoing in the 
 world as either of his momentary colleagues, Mr. 
 Freeman and Mr. Gladstone. History will perhaps 
 account it the purest and most memorable right of 
 the last-named statesman to aught of high or honour- 
 able remembrance, that he was once the champion of 
 Poerio in his years of martyr's agony, and the scourger 
 of Ferdinand II. in his devil's hour of good fortune. 
 I shall not be suspected by any man, and by no honest 
 man shall I be accused, of preference for Mohammedan 
 rather than Christian cruelties, of more tenderness 
 for Eastern than for Western tyranny. I see nothing 
 holier in a Sultan than in a Czar, in the wane of the 
 now misnamed crescent than in the advance of the 
 heavy and homicidal cross which has been laid too 
 hard already on too many a tribe and nation ; but if 
 we were compelled to choose between a waxing and 
 a waning evil, between a tyranny which at its utmost 
 can but cling to the fast narrowing limits of its 
 possible power and a tyranny which in the fullness 
 of its triumph would threaten the very light and 
 life of liberty and of justice, of righteousness and 
 of reason upon earth in that case I confess myself 
 unable to understand how any but the lovers of dark- 
 ness could bid us cast in our lot with the stronger. 
 Anarchy on the verge of dissolution, and such an 
 anarchy, we are assured on all hands, is the existing 
 empire of the Turk however horrible may be the 
 evils wrought and the agonies inflicted by the death- 
 struggle and fierce convulsions of its own, is impotent
 
 ON THE MUSCOVITE CRUSADE. 19 
 
 or beneficent by comparison with an organised and 
 militant anarchy like that of Russia. The worst 
 accusation, indeed, which can be brought against such 
 a despotism as the former, is that it naturally prepares 
 a way for the coming of a more incurable and ineradic- 
 able evil in the impending advent of the latter. 
 There can be no anarchy comparable for its power of 
 maleficence to that of a nominally monarchical govern- 
 ment in which the despot's hand, even while it grasps 
 the helm, is fettered like any galley-slave's in a convict 
 gang by the fitful good will and the perilous good 
 pleasure of a multitude which having no liberty to do 
 right, and no grace whereby to govern or to guide 
 itself, must inevitably have in their stead a vague 
 vast power to do evil, and a license of incalculable 
 and lawless force wherewith to misguide and to mis- 
 govern the policy of a master who is the veriest 
 bondman of them all. 
 
 Such axioms or reflections as these, we may be 
 reminded, are stuff for a schoolboy's theme : but the 
 stalest and most threadbare of all truths is surely 
 more profitable for consideration than the brightest 
 brandnew error or sophism in the world. And this 
 is the one possibly not inadequate excuse for a too 
 surely inadequate attempt to transcribe or to reassert 
 what would seem to be the very rudiments of the 
 instant question at issue. If our teachers of the 
 moment invite us now to renounce or to reverse them, 
 the humblest hearer on the lowest form of all has 
 some right respectfully to ask and examine for him- 
 self what probable ground there may be to warrant
 
 20 NOTE OF AN ENGLISH REPUBLICAN 
 
 his reliance on such an invitation. Like Euclio, but 
 with more bated breath and whispering humbleness, 
 he will ask for a look at the hands which are put 
 forth to point out the new letters of his unfamiliar 
 lesson ; and in some cases it may perhaps be pardon- 
 able if he should even add with the bewildered and 
 agonised miser of the grand rough old comedy, 
 ; Show the third hand too.' There might haply 
 be more of rational meaning and sound sense than 
 would at once appear under the seeming distraction 
 of such a hopeless arid delirious form of demand. 
 The men who ridicule the vanity and imbecility of 
 Russophobia may chance to remind him of the men 
 who denounce the oppressive and ill-grounded prin- 
 ciple of compulsory vaccination ; and if he happen to 
 object to free-trade in Panslavism or small-pox or 
 any such other contagion, he will hardly be inclined 
 to take part as it were on trust with the advocates or 
 the supporters of a society for the propagation and 
 circulation of either or of any kindred disease in 
 politics or in physics. If the hands be the hands of 
 murder though the voice be the voice of mercy, if 
 the hands be the hands of Russia though the voice 
 be the voice of deliverance, he will, to borrow from 
 the Master's lips a metaphor together with a counsel, 
 have exactly as much reliance on the good intentions 
 of a Czar as on the lachrymal gland of a crocodile. 
 
 But although, as we said just now, there may be 
 no nation left in Europe, since the day and long 
 before the day when Mr. Tennyson uttered on behalf 
 of forsaken Poland the noble first war-note of youth
 
 O.V THE MUSCOVITE CRUSADE. 21 
 
 and gallant genius, clear and loud in heroic deprecation 
 of all tacit compliance with the earliest wrongdoing 
 of the present Czar's father no nation which has not 
 forfeited the truly divine right to lift up voice or 
 hand on behalf of others as one pure alike of active 
 and of passive complicity with evil and oppression, 
 yet in wellnigh every nation and province there should 
 be some relics at least of a party, some remnants at 
 least of a church, whose prophets and apostles have 
 bought this right, and the right to bequeath it to their 
 disciples, with the travail and heavy labour of all their 
 lives, as with a price and a ransom paid in bloody 
 sweat and tears more bitter than very blood itself 
 
 Not with fond shekels of the tested gold, 
 Or stones whose rates are either rich or poor 
 As fancy values them ; 
 
 not with these, nor yet only with prayer and fasting, 
 the mere love-offering of preserved souls and such 
 whose minds are dedicate to nothing temporal ; but 
 with the sacrifice of a good fight fought, a great 
 course finished, a high faith kept. And surely we 
 also, in the old sacred words of the Christian 
 apostle who spoke in his day on our side, on the side 
 of a resistance to tyranny and evil yet wider and 
 deeper and more practical, more literal at once and 
 more significant as a symbol and example to all men, 
 than ever the preacher or his hearers dreamed 
 surely we also are compassed about with so great a 
 cloud of witnesses that it should be no groundless or 
 unwarrantable hope if, knowing in what and in whom 
 we have believed, we trust that now too the blood of 
 as willing and as innumerable an army of martyrs
 
 22 NOTE OF AN ENGLISH REPUBLICAN 
 
 may not fail to be the seed of a juster and stronger 
 and more reasonable faith, of a wider and higher and 
 more imperishable church, than yet was ever founded 
 by the passion and devotion of the single spirit of 
 man. For lack of martyrs and confessors most 
 assuredly we shall not fail. Cayenne, Lambessa, 
 Ischia, Caserta, Spandau, Siberia, these are but the 
 few first names that rise up as at random to remind 
 us, within the memory of men who yet are not old, 
 from how many a Golgotha the famous as the name- 
 less recruits of their noble army have been led to 
 bear their crosses up how many a Calvary. ' As the 
 stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which 
 is by the sea-shore innumerable. And what shall I 
 more say? for the time would fail me to tell of them, 
 of whom the world was not worthy,' and they gave 
 their life for the world. For the world, we say, and 
 not for any Czar or Kaiser ; nor yet that evil might 
 be cast out by evil, to make place for a third and 
 more immedicable evil than itself. ' Credo in Revo- 
 lutionemj said once in our time, and in more than 
 questionable Latin, a more than questionable servant 
 of democracy; the same half unprofitable man of a 
 perilous and hard-mouthed genius, whom Victor 
 Hugo, if I rightly remember, is reported to have 
 sometime charged with ' carrying a dried toadskin in 
 his pocket.' In a more significant variation of as 
 famous a Catholic formula, we may perhaps more 
 reasonably assert as a radical principle of a creed well 
 tested by sore experience : ' Extra Rempublicam 
 nulla solus." We have had enough and too much
 
 ON THE MUSCOVITE CRUSADE. 23 
 
 of imperial saviours, and of redeemers whose crosses 
 were for any sufferer but themselves. We have had 
 time enough and overmuch wherein to unlearn all 
 belief in the tender mercies of the wicked, in the 
 precious balms which break men's heads. We will 
 invoke no Czar to deliver us or any man on earth 
 by the memory of Peter the murderer of his son, of 
 Catherine the murderess of her husband, of Alexander 
 who was crowned and anointed by the grace and conse- 
 cration of hands which had murdered his father. How- 
 ever ' good and even noble an element in Europe ' may 
 be the presence and influence of such a royal house, of 
 such a House of Atreus as this, we will have none 
 of its benefits. We have no need to inquire with 
 Cassandra to what manner of threshold the Destroyer 
 has led us as a guide, when we like her snuff up from 
 within it the reeking savours of a slaughterhouse in 
 which the internecine form of murder is by far the 
 least criminal or horrible if indeed it be not the 
 one only tradition or heirloom of the family which 
 cannot with any show of justice be called pernicious. 
 Were we minded for once, in defiance alike of secular 
 and of sacred warning, to put our trust at all in 
 princes, we could hardly even so be mad enough to 
 begin with such as these. And with these, and not 
 with the Russian people as with an educated and 
 adult nation of free and valiant and worthy men, 
 men fit to grow up into citizens and unfit to be cut 
 down into slaves with these and with their here- 
 ditary policy it is, that in the names of justice which 
 they know not and mercy which they abhor, in the
 
 24 NOTE OF AN ENGLISH REPUBLICAN ETC. 
 
 hope of what such men most dread, and for the love 
 of all that they most hate, and for the sake of all 
 that they most despise, we are counselled now to take 
 hands in a good cause, and do what in us may lie to 
 further the ends and to deepen the foundations and 
 to strengthen the bulwarks and to widen the boun- 
 daries of their empire.
 
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