“Perhaps one fact which lies at the root of all the actions of the Turks, small and great, is that they are by nature nomads. . . .  Hence it is that when the Turk retires from a country he leaves no more sign of himself than does a Tartar camp on the upland pastures where it has passed the summer.”—­Turkey in Europe, by “Odysseus.”

The remark was once made that the Eastern Question was destined to perplex mankind up to the Day of Judgment.  Certainly that problem is extraordinarily complex in its details.  For a century and a half it has distracted the statesmen and philanthropists of Europe; for it concerns not only the ownership of lands of great intrinsic and strategic importance, but also the welfare of many peoples.  It is a question, therefore, which no intelligent man ought to overlook.

For the benefit of the tiresome person who insists on having a definition of every term, the Eastern Question may be briefly described as the problem of finding a modus vivendi between the Turks and their Christian subjects and the neighbouring States.  This may serve as a general working statement.  No one who is acquainted with the rules of Logic will accept it as a definition.  Definitions can properly apply only to terms and facts that have a clear outline; and they can therefore very rarely apply to the facts of history, which are of necessity as many-sided as human life itself.  The statement given above is incomplete, inasmuch as it neither hints at the great difficulty of reconciling the civic ideas of Christian and Turkish peoples, nor describes the political problems arising out of the decay of the Ottoman Power and the ambitions of its neighbours.

It will be well briefly to see what are the difficulties that arise out of the presence of Christians under the rule of a great Moslem State.  They are chiefly these.  First, the Koran, though far from enjoining persecution of Christians, yet distinctly asserts the superiority of the true believer and the inferiority of “the people of the book” (Christians).  The latter therefore are excluded from participation in public affairs, and in practice are refused a hearing in the law courts.  Consequently they tend to sink to the position of hewers of wood and drawers of water to the Moslems, these on their side inevitably developing the defects of an exclusive dominant caste.  This is so especially with the Turks.  They are one of the least gifted of the Mongolian family of nations; brave in war and patient under suffering and reverses, they nevertheless are hopelessly narrow-minded and bigoted; and the Christians in their midst have fared perhaps worse than anywhere else among the Mohammedan peoples.

M. de Lavelaye, who studied the condition of things in Turkey not long after the war of 1877-78, thus summed up the causes of the social and political decline of the Turks:—­