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far advanced, troops could be transported to the Austrian frontier in thirty hours, and a railroad two hundred miles in length between the Gulf of Salonica and the Adriatic would bring the coasts of Italy within forty-eight hours of the Bosphorus. With, then, unlimited sway over so great a population, mixed indeed in race and in religion, but with an overwhelming majority of one blood and one faith; with such unrivalled facilities for constructing, equipping, arming, provisioning, and manning a navy superior in power to any that has ever existed; with the consequent complete command of both the Baltic and the Mediterranean, thus environing the continent on three sides with such advantages for the concentration of force at a single point, such means of movement in every direction, and of conveying armies to the very centre of Europe by lines of march weakened by no flank exposure, while, on the contrary, his own forces would flank every hostile movement against himself,-who can doubt that the Emperor of Russia, once seated on the thrones of the Constantines, would, from his two centres of power, the Baltic and the Euxine, dictate the policy, and control the action, of every government belonging to the European political system? The Czar at Constantinople, in that event the military capital and central garrison of the Eastern continent, would give law to a wider empire than ever bowed to the sceptre of a Cæsar, and the first terrible alternative of Napoleon's sagacious prediction, "Cossack or Republican," could scarcely fail to be accomplished before the expiration of the half-century he allowed for its fulfilment.

The Emperor Septimius Severus, who in a fit of passion demolished old Byzantium in the year 196, regretted afterwards that he had destroyed the best bulwark of his empire against the barbarians of Pontus. For two centuries after the capture of new Byzantium by the Turks, in 1453, it was a most formidable battery against the liberties and even existence of Christendom; but it has now become again the most effectual obstacle to the advance of political barbarism, and whenever the western nationalities suffer this focus of physical power to fall into the hands of the great autocrat, it will be once more the most dangerous of engines for the destruction of existing European civilization.

Besides schemes of territorial aggrandizement and increase of political power, Russia has, in common with Austria, another motive for destroying the independent existence of the Ottoman state. For three hundred years Turkey has been a sure asylum to social reformers, who have been expatriated in consequence of the failure of their efforts to vindicate the rights of man in the Continental states. To the political exile her

doors have been always open, and she has never denied food and shelter to the banished patriot who has appealed to her for sustenance and protection. England and Turkey are thus the two great cities of refuge, the one for Western, the other for Eastern Europe; and as such, both are entitled to the respect of every free people and the lasting gratitude of all the friends of enlightened humanity. In 1840 the generous hospitality of Turkey saved not merely from want, but from an ignominious death, the thousands who appealed to her after the fall of the Hungarian government in that disastrous year. England and France then joined in sustaining Turkey in this most honourable course, and the much decried Anglo-Gallican alliance had its real origin in the community of opinion and feeling between the two nations to which these occurrences gave birth. Here, then, Christian despotism has both a wrong to avenge and a danger to avert. Turkey and England are alike perilous to dynastic interests, and the conquest of one is to be the prelude to the inevitable downfall of the other.

For the sake of correcting a widely diffused popular error, we must here advert to an argument of the partisans of Russia, little urged in Europe, where the subject is better understood, but much relied on in the United States, where there is great general ignorance with regard to Oriental and Russian politics. We refer to the pretence that one object of the war was to open a passage for the Russian commercial marine between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, through the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, which were alleged to have been closed to Russia by the intrigues of England and France. The Sultan of Turkey is the sovereign of both shores of the Straits, as well as of the entire coasts of the Sea of Marmora, which lies between them, and which is, according to the laws of nations, a close sea. The right of the Sultan, therefore, to close the passage of the Straits, is unquestionable; but in point of fact they have been for a long period entirely open to the commerce of of the world, Russian as well as English and French, and the trading vessels of every maritime people pass freely through them from sea to sea. Even the coasting trade between Turkish ports, a privilege which no Christian state allows to foreigners upon its own shores, has been liberally conceded to European enterprise, and is mainly carried on in Frank bottoms. That Turkey, a power of no naval strength, should not expose her unfortified capital to danger by granting to foreign armed vessels the free navigation of its approaches, and lay herself at the mercy of other powers by allowing them to penetrate the heart of her territory, occupy the Sea of Marmora, and cut off the connection between her European and Asiatic possessions, would certainly form no just cause of complaint against her.

But Russia has not even the shadow of a pretext so groundless as this. The passage of the Straits by armed vessels was formally closed to all nations by the treaty of 1841 between the five powers, with the full assent of Russia herself, who, sacrificing no right, gladly acceded to a stipulation which secured her own Euxine possessions against the danger of attack by French or English fleets, in case of war with either of those powers.

The candid American student of contemporaneous history, who seeks a satisfactory answer to the question, "Why England and France resisted the late attempted conquest of the Ottoman empire by the Russian forces ?" will find it in solemn treaty obligations, and in the dangers to which the interests of civilization and of liberty would be exposed by the further growth and expansion of a power, whose action upon every other body politic with which it has come in contact has uniformly been that of the cannon-ball,

"Shattering that it may reach, and shattering what it reaches."

That the contest, which is but adjourned, not ended, will soon be renewed, there can be little doubt. In its next phase, it will probably assume a character which will more directly appeal to our political sympathies, if not to our material interests; and it is earnestly to be hoped, that, in such an event, our moral influence at least may be thrown into the scale of human liberty and human progress.

It is our firm persuasion, that the integrity and independence of the Ottoman empire are absolutely necessary, we will not say to the maintenance of that delusive figment, the balance of power in Europe, but to the free enjoyment of human rights in any part of that continent. We shall take an early occasion to shew the grounds of our belief that Christianity and civilization are destined to win great triumphs on a soil so long regarded by Europe as irreconcilably hostile to both.

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ART. VI. 1. Histoire Générale et Système Comparé des Langues Semitiques. Par ERNEST RENAN, Première Partie, Histoire Generale des Langues Semitiques. Paris: 1855.

2. Ueber das Verhältniss der Egyptischen Sprache zum Semitischen Sprachstamm. Von THEODOR BENFEY, Leipsic, Brockhaus: 1844.

3. The Hexaglott Pentateuch, or the Five Books of Moses in the Original Hebrew, with the corresponding Samaritan, Chaldee, Syriac, and Arabic. Edited by ROBERT YOUNG. Edinburgh: Robert Young.

4. The Book of Jonah in Four Semitic Versions, viz., Chaldee, Syriac, Ethiopic, and Arabic, with corresponding Glossaries. By W. WRIGHT. Williams and Norgate, London and Edinburgh. 1857.

5. A Comparative Grammar of the Hebrew Language. By JOHN WILLIAM DONALDSON, D.D. J. W. Parker & Son. 1853.

1. Comparative Philology has frequently been likened, with no little obvious truth, to Comparative Anatomy. Viewed for a time, though rather anomalously, as mere branches of larger sciences, each has at length attained to an independent position and dignity in the rich domain of analytic knowledge. In both, a judicious comparison of well selected facts has proportionately led to manifold fruitful results.

2. Of the several important functions of Comparative Anatomy, not the least influential is its application to determine "the relative degrees of complexity in the organization of different animals, and the number and value of the points of resemblance which different species manifest to each other in the totality of their organization." Philology, in like manner, in its largest sense, may be described as the department of knowledge, whose aim is to explain the relative development of the various families of human language, and the true nature of such facts in each as seem to point to a common source and

centre.

3. In their analogous relation also to the most important discoveries in the earliest history of the earth and man respectively, these sciences furnish the reflective mind with a source of instruction and interest equally varied and abundant.

4. Exceeding in fascination the most alluring and exalted pretensions of ancient magic, Comparative Anatomy, quickened by the spirit of philosophic genius, and meekly bending before the hallowed shrine of scientific truth, has almost recalled in everything but life and locomotion the vanished ages of the immeasurable past. Especially in the hands of Professor Richard Owen, and other mighty masters of its

deeper secrets, it has in our own times assumed a greatly enlarged sphere of interpretation, and thereby entered into more intimate alliances with other important departments of thought and inquiry. How could any one have dreamed even at the period of John Hunter's highest success, that a mighty host of extinct animal forms would have been already summoned into the light of day, to bear testimony to previous physical conditions of our island-home, widely different from the present? Who could have imagined half a century since that in our Oolitic system, for example, no dubious remains of insectivorous Amphitheria and Phascolotheria, the tiny progenitors of an almost countless offspring, would be laid bare to the eyes of the curious, or, that we would ever have known certainly, that amidst the stately and luxuriant palm-groves of a tropical land, which, at the distant close of oft-repeated revolutions, was divinely destined to provide the materials of the physical geography of modern England, vast herds of Pachyderms should have lived and died.

5. Nor is the Comparative Philology of recent times awanting in similar disclosures of the remote history of our race. "At that time" (the period of Voss' literary triumphs), remarks Niebuhr in the Preface to his Roman History, "philology had already reached that height, which is now the boast of our nation. It had recognised its calling to be the mediator between the remotest ages, to afford us the enjoyment of preserving an unbroken identity with the noblest and greatest nations of the ancient world, by familiarising us through the medium of grammar and history, with the works of their minds, and the course of their destinies, as if there were no gulf which divided us from them."

6. But with still greater emphasis, and deeper significancy, we can now employ these eloquent words of the modern founder of philosophic history, if, in a reflective spirit, we rightly estimate the marked growth of classical, but more especially, of comparative philology, in Germany and England since the day in which he wrote.

7. In 1776, Brassy Halhed published his translation of the "Gentoo Laws," and thereby, though apparently in profound unconsciousness of his memorable position, gave an impulse to comparative philology of remarkable virtue and extent. As an instrument of divine sovereignty he had his own peculiar task to perform, and thus when giving expression, without the pretension either of present achievement or coming fame, to his simple faith in the linguistic value of an old Indian tongue, he became an illustrative instance of the lines of the Poet Laureate :

"Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs,

And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns."

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