purpose to one and to another. The result of three years' secret propagandism is forty converts. Yet he has made sufficient progress to beget persecution from the powerful hand of authority, and the prejudicial hand of idolatry. His high connections, his wealth, his personal influence, his appellation of The Faithful, afford him now no protection. His enemies make attempts upon his life. He and his followers retire before their rage, and a decree of non-intercourse is promul gated against them. Seeking refuge in the neighbouring town of Tayef, he is stoned, expelled, and pursued insultingly beyond its walls. At the age of fifty he has preached ten years, and is still compelled to seek safety in concealment. Three years longer he endures the bitter enmity of his race-the constant presence of personal danger, and at last finds an asylum in the city of Medina. This is the first ripened fruit of his long and anxious toil and suffering, the commencement of his prosperity. Now reflect we, and ask, with his biographer,* “If worldly advantage had been his object, how had it been obtained?" Closely allied to the highest families of Mecca, to the most honoured of its citizens, he had rank; marrying a wealthy widow, successful in numerous commercial expeditions, he had riches; esteemed by the inhabitants of his beloved Mecca, endowed by his moral worth with great local influence, he had honour. Rank, riches, honour!-what else needed he that he should peril all, comfort and personal safety to boot? What manner of man is this, who loses all that impostors seek to gain, for the sake of some careless vanity, the vanity of a deceiver's fame? Would an impostor submit to be insulted in the streets, to be lampooned in the popular songs of poets, to be assailed and nearly strangled in the sacred edifice of the people, for the poor reward of being the world's wonder for a day? And if not worldly gain his object, what sought he in the deep degradation of imposture? Mahomet returned the hospitality of the Medinese by teaching in all their purity the morals of Christ-devotion to God, humanity But his long suffering ultimately changed the sweet current of his peaceful "Thirteen years of meek endurance to man. ways. * Washington Irving. had been rewarded by nothing but aggravated insult and injury;"* a hundred camels had been offered as the price of his capture or his death; four times had the assassin dogged his path with bloody threats, and the poison of another was ultimately destined to terminate his prophecy. The warlike spirit of the Medinian tribes, with a logic more convincing than words, had shown to the injured prophet how mighty was the might of arms. Now began the exhibition of the natural wrath of his Arabian vehemence. He proclaimed the apostleship of the sword, the virtue of that fearful agent which convulsed the East with war, and filled the air with cries of Moslem victory. It was the work of an Arab filled with the fury of religious zeal, of an Arab whose kinsmen were inured to the fierceness of incessant discord. Let us here, while judging of this most prominent phase in his career, again bear in remembrance the characteristics of his race, his country, and his time, for therein we may find that to extenuate, which cannot justify, the national spirit which makes one people pacific, another relentlessly contentious. From the time of his famous declaration, "Paradise lies under the shadow of swords," to the hour of his death, the history of Mahomet is a wondrous succession of military exploits, personal deeds of unequalled valour, withal beautiful in the minglement of the saintly odours of sweet mercy, the manumission of slaves, the ransomeless liberation of captives. The last orders of Mahomet, while the "poison of Khaibas was rending his entrails," were worthy of his whole life: "Give freedom to my bondmen, distribute my remaining wealth among the poor." Thus died the founder of the Islam faith, the iconoclast of Arabia. He found his land a host of warring tribes; he left it a nation. He found his people divided by the impotence of sects; he left them in the unity of religion-found them bent before the impurity of images, left them in the sublimelysimple worship of the Eternal Spirit. Are these the accomplishments of an impostor, the works wrought by deception? Verily, they are not, for the fruits of deception are ashes, and the end of impostors is mournless death. * Irving's "Life of Mahomet," chap. xvi. Arabian tradition, rich in its imaginative Mecca led, there was talismanic faith, the lore, has fringed the simple life of Mahomet triumphs whereof demonstrate the infinite with the doubtful sanctity of miraculous grandeur of this, the sole human source of fable. "I am but a man like yourselves," super-human power. In the essence of this was his own declaration; and the only prophet's doctrines there was the vitality of a miracle he claimed was the Koran. If it mountain-moving force-a force moving even be still held that he professed the possession empires, the great empires of Persia and of of supernatural powers, I reply that the Rome. These works-the works of persame evidence which bears witness to his sistency and of faith-this rending of colosprofession bears witness also to his perform- sal power, are the seal of Mahomet's proance thereof. We have the same authority phetship, the testimony to his faithful genfor his division of the moon in the presence uineness. of numbers, as for his seven-heavens' journey in the presence of none. To discard the evidence of what is impossible, is to doubt that same evidence when it relates to what is more creditable, but not less im- of even our own-but too strongly exemprobable. A prudent judge takes no note of a perjured man's testimony. Ought we to be less prudent when the testifier is tradition? These stories of evident fiction are, to me, no proof of Mahomet's conscious imposture. In the persistent life which this man of But God, let us be sure, had a purpose in this man's mission, as in all things else—a purpose not yet completed, as the religious indifference of I know not how many nations plifies. Let us understand this purpose,— the demonstration of the everlasting and resistless force of national religious life,-and Mahomet will appear to us, not as an Arabian impostor, but as the exponent of a sacred truth for ever. REPUBLICOLA. Politics. WAS THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT JUSTIFIED IN ENTERING UPON THE PRESENT WAR WITH RUSSIA? AFFIRMATIVE REPLY. WE feel almost more inclined to congratulate our readers than to reply to our opponents. We sit down to write under the happiest auspices. The "standing menace" of the Black Sea has passed away, and been destroyed by the suicidal hands of "Holy Russia." The massacre of Sinope has been avenged; and the waters which wash the ruined harbour of the Russian stronghold roll over the sunken ships of her greatest navy,-a navy whose solitary exploit was murder, whose history was inglorious sloth and shameful cowardice, and whose end was self-destruction! Not one boat remains; while the Crescent still streams from the topmast of many a gallant ship. Since this debate was opened, how grand the list of glorious pledges of complete success! Then, we reverently uttered the prayer, "May God defend the right!"- now, from cottage and from palace the cry of rejoicing triumph rises upwards-the thanksgiving-prayers of a nation's gratitude go up to a nation's God from every christian sanctuary Since then, Alma and Inkermann have given place in part to Tchernaya, Kertch, Ghenitchi. Sweaborg-the "Gibraltar of the North"-has been dismantled, wrapped in flames, and stripped of all save the hewn casemates of living rock. And now, as we write, England yet rings with shouts of victory, yet trembles with the vibration of those electric shocks which told her that Sebastopol had fallen. Everywhere she is answering the invocation of the poet, "Now joy, Old England, raise! The triumph is one of no secondary im she distribute clasps and ribands? Will she deck her soldiery with medals? Shall Sinope's tragedy be engraved on the one face, and Hango on the reverse? The final blow of Crimean failure has at length befallen her. Besieged in her own stronghold-a mighty navy imprisoned in its harbour-one army garrisoning its forts and others attempting in vain to raise the siege-she concentrated all her resources, put forth all her strength, and failed to hold her own. She has quailed and fled before the feu d'enfer -the crushing thunder of the allied cannon, planted by them around the doomed city of her pride, three thousand miles away from their own peaceful shores. She has yielded in panic terror, and left behind four thousand cannon and immense stores of ammunition as proofs of her total and unexpected defeat. She deemed not that her hour was quite so near at hand. portance. It is on her own soil that the might of Russia has been vanquished. Centuries only can ever restore that terrible prestige of invincibility which has been wrested from her. Never, perhaps, has a mighty nation been so humbled in the eyes of the world! What can her future historians point to but disaster and disgrace? Was she not foiled and held at bay by the very Turks whom she despised? Will she inscribe upon her banners the names of Kalafat, Citate, and Oltenitza? She deems it the saving of her honour that she yielded up Sebastopol a heap of "ensanguined ruins" to her foes; what can she say of Bomarsund? how comes it that she retired from before the fifth-rate fortress of Silistria? The Turkman's bannered crescent never ceased to wave upon the mud-walled fortress of the Danube; the Russian only veils the forced flight of his eagles from their rock-built eyrie by wrapping it in flames. Silistria The war is not yet ended. Its duration and Sebastopol! May we not say of the and future character are veiled in the gloom latter," E'en a crow of the same nest; not which wraps futurity from human ken; but altogether so great as the first in goodness, we deem that its greatest object is already but greater a great deal in evil. . . . . In accomplished. Our poor "distressed" (p. 298) retreat they outrun any lackey; marry, in friend, T. U., (who, finding "the original coming on they have the cramp"? The grounds of the war" "meagre and unsatistale of Russian failure is uniform almost to factory," amuses the readers of the Contromonotony. Invading the principalities, she versialist by exposing the far more "meagre is compelled to withdraw; invaded in the and unsatisfactory" character of his own Crimea, she is forced to submit. Eupatoria, opinions,) informs us that if the present war Balaklava, Kamiesch, Kertch, are all garri- "ever was a war justifiable on the part of soned by her foes. Is she attacked by equal this country, it may totally change its chanumbers? The bloody heights of Alma racter." "May!" Poor distressed reasoner, were won from her under every disadvantage; shall we then omit to do right, for fear that her cherished fortresses in the Sea of Azoff we may" hereafter do wrong? Shall we are all levelled to the ground, or held by her not rather do the right boldly, and watch foes; the garrison of Bomarsund were shipped carefully against this snake-in-the-grass en masse to foreign shores; the defenders of "may"? "Thrice is he armed that hath Sweaborg were almost annihilated. Does she his quarrel just;"-shall England cast her attack in overwhelming numbers?-Let In- threefold armour aside, and sit wringing her kermann proclaim how 8,000 British soldiers, hands in anguish at the "mays" and "perenfeebled by sickness, want, and overwork, hapses" which beset all mundane projects? and taken by surprise, hurled back her co- Again, T. U. inquires, with an air of innolumns, and bravely kept their own until the cent naiveté most refreshing to witness,gallant Bosquet joined them in the final "What is the present war for? Why is it charge of victory. Let Balaklava and her waged?" These little queries are denomifar-famed cavalry charges answer how Rus-nated "distressing" by their propounder, and sian onslaughts fare. Let the foiled attempt we in some degree sympathize in the epion Eupatoria and the slaughter of the Tcher- thet; it is somewhat wearisome to answer naya speak. Where has Russian might for the thousandth time questions which prevailed? Where are her trophies? Will ninety-nine out of every hundred sane Engshe preserve the flag of the stranded "Tiger" lishmen are able to answer for themselves. as the sole memento of her prowess? Will We endeavoured some six months ago to 66 give a plain reason for and justification of the war, and have since been supported by the corroborative arguments of other writers. It appears to us, at least, that T. U. might have condescended to show that the answers already given were faulty, before he demanded further replies. It surely would have been more apropos to the subject to have employed his pen in something like responsive argument, instead of meandering through two full pages of print, which are as applicable to the Chinese rebellion or the Santal insurrection as to the subject before us. Our Editors propose the question,-"Was the British government justified in entering into the present war with Russia?" and T. U., with all possible gravity, replies, "We would tax our American possessions -a war was the consequence. . . Our wars with France arose from an intense hatred of democracy, &c."! Nay, as if these things were not sufficiently divergent from the subject in hand, we are led to "consider our Indian warfare, our wars at the Cape, and the recent Chinese war;" to meditate on "France, which succumbs to the usurpation of the coup d'état," and her Algerian wars; on "Hungary, and Poland, and Rome;" and forsooth, inter alia, on the statement that "we even yet impose an adverse establishment on the Irish population." The Irish Church may have some connection with the Russian war in the mind of T. U.; but we feel assured that it has none in any other brain. In fact, the whole gist of his mighty paragraph, commencing on page 298 and ending at the last line but one of page 300, amounts to this-All our wars HAVE BEEN 66 wars of ambition, treachery, and crime;" THEREFORE, this war Is one of the same kind. The patriotism and logic of such reasoning are on a par. We certainly do not envy the feelings of a writer whose best words for his country and countrymen are "the grossest injustice," "wanting in a sense of justice," "entertaining the bitterest hatred," 66 we talk of defending liberty; it is mere talk," &c.! But, granting for a moment that all this were true, it is a novel kind of argument to assume that we are wrong now, simply because we were wrong years ago. As the paragraph progresses, the Turk"the lazy Turk"-comes in for an equal share of vituperation, and we feel considerably at a loss to know which, in T. U.'s opi nion, is the worse-the Saxon or his eastern ally. Of course, it is no province of ours to enter into a defence of Turkey. If her condition be bad, we rest assured that it will not be improved by coming under Russian power. We doubt whether she can show anything in the way of religious intolerance so bad as the knouting to which the fair nuns of Minsk were subjected by the "Orthodox Czar." We are not aware of the existence of a Turkish Siberia. The christian population doubtless have been oppressed, but they are not persecuted for their religion, further than by the withholding of many civil rights; while the Jews were only recently expelled utterly from Russia. Turkey has nothing to match the vast spread of serfdom and abject slavery which obtains in Russia. And it must ever be remembered, that Turkey is known to us in all her faults and weaknesses, while Russia is almost unknown, save by the passing notices of a very few travelling authors. But, as we have said, it is no province of ours to defend Turkey from the tirades of T. U., or his master and example, Mr. Cobden. We maintain that, be Turkey what she may in internal condition, outwardly she is a member of the European confederation of nations; and as such has a right to appeal (with confident hope of a generous answer) for assistance against the aggressions of her insolent and powerful neighbour. It is no justification for me to refuse assisting my fellow man when attacked by a thief or assassin, simply because he neglects his family and is unkind to his wife. How far T. U. may be trusted in his statements, we leave the reader to judge, when he has read the single sentence, "We refuse to demand from Turkey any change of relations for doing substantial justice to the christian population."* We most sincerely pity a writer who is so utterly ignorant of the facts which he argues upon, and suggest that it is the moral duty of * We presume that this anti-syntactical sentence means, in plain English, that "we refuse to demand from Turkey that she should do subthis statement is made in face of the fact that we stantial justice to her christian population." And are well nigh revolutionizing Turkey by the reforms which our pertinacity has forced upon the Porte! To instance one solitary specimen-Is few months the evidence of Christians has been not every schoolboy aware that within the last admitted into the Turkish law courts? every controversialist to state only what he knows to be true, not what he may happen to think is true. On this head we beg to refer T. U. to Lord Clarendon's despatch of June 24, 1853, quoted ante, p. 383, col. 2; he will perhaps accept correction at the hands of his coadjutor more readily than from us. But we purpose to answer once more the distressing questions" rather than to follow the wanderings of our friend,-to show that the war has an object, and that that object is already in great part attained, though it may yet be some time before it is finally secured and rendered certain. Of this war we may truly say, ""Tis waged for right and justice, and to show That when certain nations fell among thieves Barbarian despots-who despoiled them, Oppressed, and smote them to the ground, then thou, and counsel. Our opponents have carefully ignored the manly rebuke (p. 186, supra) which the British government addressed, in January, 1853, to the French cabinet; but to the reader it will carry convincing weight. France gradually receded from the strict rigour of her demands; Russia, on the other hand, made fresh requirements, and in the haughtiest spirit seized on the principalities, wrested them from their rightful owner. This direct spoliation and aggression met with no resistance from the Allies; they merely formed a court of arbitration, and laboured to settle the quarrel. Negotiations proceeded: the diplomatists blundered in their schemes, in favour of Russia, but promptly and unanimously (be it remembered that the Philo-Russian states of Austria and Prussia were of the number) amended the error. Meanwhile, Turkey declared war against her oppressor, and appealed, in a document of convincing logic, to the opinion and sympathy of Europe. The Czar refused to abide by the amended verdict of the arbitrating powers; and at last, as all hope of a pacific arrangement faded away, England and France made a conditional declaration of war. In effect they said, "Restore the territories you have seized; retract your first aggressive step, or else we declare war.' Could forbearance go further? Here again we find, as already stated in our previous article, that Austria and Prussia, who surely cannot be suspected of any unfavourable bias against Russia, supported the allied demand. Now, mark! the Allies demanded, on February 27, 1854, that an assurance should be given by Russia, that she would evacuate the principalities by the 1st.of May. She refused this slight concession to England and France in the spring, and, according to her own statements, she granted it to Austria in the autumn, as a matter of courtesy. We have no wish to pin Russia to this statement, because we believe it to be false. In the spring the armies of the Czar Before, we tried the effect of prose: we were met by no foes but the Turks; in the now quote poetry. Either, we doubt not, autumn they had a campaign of disgrace and will suffice to satisfy the generality of our defeat to look back upon-an Anglo-French readers. The present war is, in our view, army at Varna was panting with a desire to an act of international police,-an attempt meet them in the shock of battle, and Austo arrest and bring to punishment the arch- tria herself was pouring troops into the prinrobber of Europe. When the disputes between cipalities. Russia is not the first instance France, Russia, and Turkey arose, England of the force of circumstances in changing looked on in friendly guise, tendering advice | braggart insolence into an assumption of po A very priest and Levite in thy pity, Thou art a strong man armed, keeping his house |
