Inconsistent Jacobinism

11th November, 1901.

In 1894, 1895, and 1896 I contributed several papers on the Eastern Question to the Progress. At that time public opinion was much excited and indignant over the massacres in Armenia, but none of the Powers who signed the Berlin Treaty thought fit to interfere. Massacres on a small scale were renewed from time to time, and a few months ago they reached considerable proportions; but nothing was done to punish the culprits, or to protect the victims of Turkish barbarity.

This week a mild surprise has been caused by the sending of the French fleet to Turkish waters. The callous lethargy, which a sense of duty, a chivalrous sympathy with the weak and the oppressed, could not dispel, has yielded to a financial exigency. Two naturalized citizens are creditors of the Sultan for a large sum. It is true they have been receiving most usurious interest these last fifteen years, but now Lorando and Turbini wish to recover their capital; and lo! the might of France is put forth on their behalf! It is said that M. Waldeck Rousseau, the Premier, is professionally interested in the matter, and will receive a fee even bigger than the one he earned when he saved his clients in the Panama scandal, who are now in the seats of the mighty. The long-suffering French taxpayer will grudgingly pay the expenses of this naval demonstration, and the Porte will promptly pay up in order to be rid of his unwelcome visitors. But France does not mean to be a simple collector for MM. Lorando and Turbini.

The elections of 1902 are at hand, and the semi-Jacobins in power are anxious to obtain the suffrages of the better element, and not be entirely carried away captive by their Socialist and ultra-Jacobin supporters, through whom they have seized the reins of government.

The Crimean war, as I have shown in Slav and Moslem, was partly brought about by a similar preoccupation on the part of Napoleon III, who had just made himself emperor by an infamous coup d'état. Voltairean France had allowed her protectorate over the Eastern Christians to fall into desuetude, and Russia supplanted her. But when the latter exercised her treaty-acquired rights, France and England combined against her.

today with impudent inconsistency the Third Republic, which has done its utmost, these thirty years, to dechristianize France, sees fit to exact from the Porte that French religious schools be allowed to multiply freely, and that its protectorate over Eastern Christians be distinctly recognized.

What is more, the Republic demands that the Catholic University of Beyruth deliver diplomas entitling the recipients to practise medicine in all parts of the Turkish empire. Now, considering that the Third Republic has just made a most iniquitous law against religious congregations, depriving French parents of the means of educating their children in accordance with their faith, it is a grotesque incongruity that the Turks should be compelled to harbour these congregations and their schools, which are being closed in France with a latent view to establishing a Government monopoly of education.

This university of Beirut, and practically all the French schools and hospitals in Turkey, are under the direction of Jesuits, Dominicans, Assumptionists, etc., and they are of great importance to French influence, as they implant this language and the love of a nation that has such admirable sons and daughters.

I have no doubt that railroad concessions will also be demanded, and that all details were discussed during the Czar's recent visit to Paris. Russia is using France to checkmate Germany in her Bagdad railway scheme, and to undermine her influence with the Sultan.

The deaths of Abdul Hamid and the Emperor of Austria may at any moment precipitate the European crisis which all expect and fear.

Meanwhile, neither China nor the Moslems have said their last word. In the heart of China, Tung-fu-Siang and Prince Tuan may, even now, be engaged in founding a new Mohammedan power. A China galvanized by that dangerous vitality of Islam would mean the extinction of Europe in China. And if any great Moslem chief should succeed in combining the interests of the faithful in Africa and Turkey, the European nations may all look to their laurels.

The self-conceit and self-complacency of the white races are simply immense. This self-complacency is unparalleled, except perhaps by that which distinguished the Jewish people. Because Providence had chosen them for the accomplishment of certain designs which were to embrace the whole human race in their ultimate scope, the Hebrews flattered themselves that the Gentiles only existed for their benefit, as the yellows, browns, and blacks do for us today. When the chosen people had filled their cup of iniquity, heedless of that last pathetic appeal, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem," etc., there came that terrible siege (A.D. 70) which made them henceforth a people without an altar, without a country.

Another proud empire arose, intoxicated with material and military greatness, and we all know how the barbarians, our forefathers, overthrew the mighty empire of the Caesars.

We, their descendants, flatter ourselves that because we wield the sceptre of civilization and science, we do so in virtue of some inherent race-qualities, and that our candlestick can never be moved, whatever may have happened to the rushlights of antiquity. But if we have been in the vanguard of civilization and science since many centuries, it is merely because we were Christendom. today Protestantism has devoured, one by one, all the vital truths of Christianity, till it is strictly true to say of many so-called Christian peoples and individuals, "Thou hast a name"—for Christian beliefs with their practical sides have been almost eliminated.

When the apostasy of the governments of Christian peoples shall have been consummated, when unlimited divorce, which is successive polygamy, shall be generalized; when monogamy shall vanish from our codes, which forms, with freedom from slavery, the line of demarcation between Western and Eastern civilization—then indeed shall we be ready for the burning.

The modern barbarians are at our gates, nay, in our midst. Godless education and the peculiar political methods of unscrupulous, educated proletariat are rapidly preparing what may be termed government by anarchy.

Yesterday I spent a few hours at Nice, and was waiting for a tramway to return home, when a youth of about fifteen, with a candid, ingenuous countenance, waved his newspapers just out with the cry: "Voilà la lutte sociale. Buy La lutte sociale." I took the extended copy, asking the youth if he believed in the lutte sociale (Social Struggle).

"Oh yes, of course I do," he replied with a most convinced air.

"What is this lutte sociale?" I inquired. This he "did not know."

Glancing through the leading article, I read a virulent denunciation of the clergy, and a most contemptuous diatribe against the masses, à la Voltaire. "They [the masses] are formed of vicious, ignorant, covetous individuals. . . . What writers call 'the soul' of the multitude is in general nothing but an immense horrible cry of wild beasts, an accumulation of the lowest instincts of the human brute . . . they do not reason, they howl and they strike."

It is these masses that unscrupulous politicians and secret societies are preparing to hurl against organized society as in 1789, after having destroyed in them from infancy all reverence for God or man: Ni Dieu ni maître—neither God nor master.

In self-defence, society will be compelled to restore Christianity, or slavery—or perish.