For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. GORDON. IN MEMORIAM. I. ON through the Libyan sand League on long league, cleaving the rainless land, Fed by no friendly wave, the immemorial Nile. II. Down through the cloudless air, III. Beneath the stars, beside the unpausing flood, Earth trembles at the wandering lion's roar ; Trembles again, when in blind thirst of blood Sweep the wild tribes along the startled shore. IV. They sweep and surge and struggle, and are gone: The mournful desert silence reigns again, The ordered stars gaze blank upon the plain. V. O awful Presence of the lonely Nile, Unto the mind's true-seeing inward eye Another haunting Presence as sublime, Yea, rather fairer far Than stream, or sky, or star, To live while star shall burn or river roll, Unmarred by marring Time, The crown of Being, a heroic soul. VI. Beyond the weltering tides of worldly change He saw the invisible things, The eternal Forms of Beauty and of Right; Wherewith well pleased his spirit wont to range, Rapt with divine delight, Richer than empires, royaler than kings. VII. Lover of children, lord of fiery fight, He measured small and great, But by some righteous balance wrought in heaven, To his pure hand by Powers empyreal given; Therewith, by men unmoved, as God he judged aright. VIIL As on the broad sweet-watered river tost And melts to naught, nor leaves embittering trace; As in the o'er-arching vault THE rancor of the east wind quell'd, a thrush Joyfully talking on through glittering rain, O see the yellow tufts along the lane, Crowding the budded copse round every bush, Starring the dingle by its brooklet's gush, Dotting the elm-path's border, who not fain To drink their tender sweetness, cool and fresh, Waking old thoughts, unutterably dear. Athenæum. From The Westminster Review. THE OTTOMAN TURKS IN EUROPE. FOR the past four hundred years, some of the fairest portions of the south-east of Europe have been subject to a race alien alike in origin, character, and religion to the other European States. With this fact, on its practical side, we are to a certain extent familiarized by the continual recurrence of the so-called Eastern question. We have heard much and often of the weakness, the corruption, and the decay of the Turkish Empire. Its ever-impending yet ever-delayed disappearance has been constantly before the eyes of the European world. It has provided a neverfailing material for diplomatic arrangements and rearrangements, which have, however, left the problem still unsolved; it has again and again proved a disturbance to the peace of Europe, now by its apparent weakness, and the consequent aggressions of powerful neighbors; now by its reckless misgovernment and the resulting insurrections of its subject provinces. Indeed, the present position of Turkey has engrossed so much of our practical consideration, that we have perhaps ceased to wonder at the strangeness of the phenomena which Turkish history presents. We do not always realize that regions, the seats, in former ages, of Greek enterprise and civilization, and the centre for centuries of the eastern division of the Roman Empire, are held now by a race which, six hundred years ago was a nomad horde still ranging the table-lands of Asia. Nor on the other hand, perhaps, do we always bear in mind how immense a contrast between its former energy and force and its present paralysis and degradation the history of this race suggests. We shall attempt, therefore, in the following pages, not to trace the history of the Ottoman Turks forward step by step with minuteness, but, if possible, to point out some of the causes which have made that history so unique and remarkable; to explain the wonderful rapidity of their earlier successes and their recognition as an integral power of Europe; to show the inherent sources of weakness; to deter mine the causes which ultimately led to decrepitude and decay; and finally to ad vert to the wonderful vitality which, like so many of the lower organisms, it has in spite of all displayed. To this end we shall use the more concrete facts of history as the joints and framework necessary for the consistency and clearness of our subject. The migrations of races have usually followed the course of the sun, and the historian must cast his eye eastward to discover the original domicile even of the civilized nations of western Europe as well as of those nomad hordes which have from time to time devastated its southeastern provinces, or penetrated to the bleak shores of the northern sea. High Asia has not inaptly been termed "the mother of nations," but with almost equal appropriateness it might be called the fertile parent of Western revolutions. From its widely extended table-lands there have issued, from prehistoric ages, successive irruptions of barbarous and nomadic tribes impelled from their seats by movements of new national life to the eastward, and in their turn passing on the shock, now with less, now with more momentum, to the west, and causing there some of the most remarkable crises and revolutions of history. After the Indo-European or Aryan race had made its passage from central Asia towards the west, depositing on its way the seeds of future civilizations, there seems to have been a pause, perhaps of centuries, in the migratory transits described above. When they recommenced, they represented the movements of a different and a less civilized race — the Turanian- and of this the most numerous as well as the most historically important division were the Turks. race, in all probability, belonged, though space forbids us to enter into the question here, the succession of invading tribes which, under the names of Huns, Avars, Bulgarians, Khazars, Patzinaks, and Uzi, penetrated into Europe north of the Black Sea, passed over the steppes of southern Russia, and broke in successive waves upon the northern frontiers of the Eastern Empire. To this Fierce, sometimes irresistible, however, as these invasions were, the barbarous Eastern Empire; southward there were the political organization and religious enthusiasm of the Saracens. Barbarians could hardly make the passage unchanged and unaffected by these new conditions of complex; causes and conditions are multiplied, and the affiliation of results is more momentous but more difficult. tribes in no case founded any permanent the Seljukians. If the northern Turks settlements in Europe. They disappeared had, throughout their migrations, remained after a longer or a shorter period of suc- uncivilized and barbarous, the case was cess, sometimes all but annihilated by the far otherwise with the Seljukians and Othideous carnage of those barbarous battle- tomans. The more southerly direction fields, sometimes no doubt amalgamated taken by them had made their history very with the surrounding nationalities, often different from that of the tribes already dispersed, and in scattered bands retrac- mentioned. The steppes of Russia were ing their steps towards the north or east. as suited to nomadic tribes as the plains Meanwhile the Eastern Empire, often tot- of Asia, and the various north-Danubian tering to its foundation through the rude races had received no more than the eleshocks thus received, still maintained its ments of civilization. But south of the ground, and to some extent its old pres- Euxine all was different. The course tige. From the same eastern region and from Persia to Constantinople was no by the same race, but by a different route, uncivilized tract of country which barbaa more formidable and, in the end, a more rian hordes could traverse at pleasure. fatal attack was being gradually prepared. In the northern portion there was the Towards the close of the tenth century civilization and military power of the there crossed the Jaxartes a numerous horde of Turks expelled from their more eastern homes, and led by a chieftain named Seljuk. He, after encamping some time in the neighborhood of Samarcand, embraced with his tribe the Mahommedan life. Hence their history becomes more religion, and fired with religious zeal, or its semblance, handed down to his successors a power soon to be developed into an empire. Advancing westward from Persia, the tribe, called from its original leader, the Seljukians, gradually overran the whole of Asia Minor and founded the seat of its empire at Nicæa, not one hundred miles from Constantinople. Frequent were the collisions during the next hundred years with the Roman Empire, which, when almost at its weakest and most hopeless state, was granted a brief respite by the first Crusade, which compelled the Seljukians, in the beginning of the twelfth century, to remove their capital to Iconium. It was at this period that the Mongol invasion of Zenghiz Khan and his successors convulsed both Europe and Asia Minor, and when the hordes of Tartars at last dispersed, they left the Seljukians wrecked and helpless, and the road lay open for a fresh migration of another division of the same race the Ottomans. Starting from the same region as the Seljukians, following a similar course, and like them imbued, but in a still greater degree, with Mahomedan fanaticism, they, under the lead of Ertogruhl, now entered upon the heritage of It was in 1356 that the Ottomans first crossed the Hellespont into Europe, but we should ill understand their subsequent successes if we did not briefly advert to their career across the straits, which furnished the antecedents of much that was peculiar in their history. For three bundred years before the final passage into Europe the Turks of Asia Minor had been engaged in wars from which they learned the military discipline and tactics of European armies; for the Crusades, into which were thrown the chief martial energy of western Europe from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, were mostly, as Latham points out, not against Saracens but Turks. It is true that these great conflicts were fought farther to the south than the Seljukians or Ottomans penetrated, but between the different Turkish tribes of Asia Minor there were constant relations either friendly or hostile, and the military improvements of one would soon find their way to all the rest, just as we find that the degree of civilization and warlike skill possessed by the Turks of Iconium was at once appropriated by their Ottoman successors. But besides the Against this tottering power there was Crusades there had been other wars with opposed all the freshness of a youthful Europeans, which had affected in the nation, all the fanaticism of a conquering closest way the more northern Turks religion. The dominions founded by Othwars with the very power which guarded man were soon increased by his son Or. the entry into Europe. From opposite khan, under whom the first passage into sides, from Constantinople and Trebizond, Europe took place. Nicomedia, Nicæa, the Seljukians, and after them the Otto- Pergamus, successively fell into his hands, mans, found constant and formidable in- and in 1356 he crossed the straits into the structors in the arts of war. Hence, when imperial territory, first as a paid ally of the band of Turks under Ertogruhl de- the emperor Catacuzene, but to abide scended from Khorasan, and passing there as the possessor of the Thracian westward of the Euphrates and Mount Kallipolis. But the importance of Orkhan Taurus, sought fresh seats in Asia Minor, in Ottoman history lies in more lasting they found themselves amongst kindred though more intangible actions than the races whose heritage of warlike expe- capture of cities or even the passage of rience as well as of actual dominion they the straits. He appears as a great legiswere not slow to make their own. And lator and as a great political organizer, this double appropriation as well as their more prominently even than as a conrapid progress towards Europe was ren- queror. dered easy and natural by the circum- Before a European empire could be stances which marked the period of their founded, it was necessary for an invading appearance. The Seljukian empire had army to have a secure standing-ground in had its short and brilliant day of barbaric | Asia. The safety of Constantinople had conquest and barbaric civilization. The long consisted in its double territory; the causes to prolong its natural term were wanting; it was stricken by a complete "moral palsy" within, and by the terrible flood of Mongol invasion from without. The Ottoman nation was fresh, receptive, and as yet uncorrupted, barbarous indeed, but aided by the moral force and rising order which their zealous profession of Islam gave them. Their first possession in Bithynia expanded with rapidity in all directions, and they soon found themselves face to face with the empire which had endured so many shocks from their northern kinsmen. Constantinople had now entered into a settled decline. Shattered and divided by the events which led to the Latin dynasty, no longer protected on the north by the now threatening king doms of Servia and Bulgaria, and utterly enfeebled by political and moral corruption, she was quite unable to make head against her resolute and persistent enemies on the eastern frontier. A chance of recovery presented itself when the Russian power and the Seljukian empire were simultaneously broken by the Mongol invasion, but her weakness amounted to a paralysis, and the opportunity went by. success of the Turks depended on the same condition. Accordingly the great work of Orkhan was the consolidation of the Turkish possessions in Asia. Unlike a purely barbarian conqueror, he deliberately entered on this task, and performed it with consummate skill. Communes were established, mosques erected, schools founded, and the whole country, which at that time owned his supremacy, welded and compacted by a system of civil administration which left his successor free to pursue fresh conquests westward. But with all his administrative talent, he probably owed much of his success to more general causes. It must never be forgot. ten that he had not to begin de novo. code of laws for his subjects was provided for him by the Mahomedan religion, a code, too, which had been expressly adapted by its founder to the necessities of a conquering nation. This law was not only provided for him, but obedience to it was ensured by sanctions stronger than he could have invented. The importance of this assistance to the ruler of a newly rising dominion, in holding together his subjects and tightening the reins of authority, can hardly be over-estimated, and A |