# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1861_S55
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Ottoman Empire. 55

element in the Orient to be its own task. In this sense the Porte was induced to issue the Hatti-Humayun guaranteeing equal rights for Christians with the Mohammedans; the Sultan's good will was accepted as sufficient guarantee for its execution, and the bastard child of Europe and Asia was legitimized and admitted into the family of European states. — But, as was to be foreseen, matters rested with the Sultan's good will: the Hatti-Humayun lies buried, a dead letter, among the acts of the Congress of Paris; the ear of the Turk, which his guardians had covered with the cap of political and moral parity, comes into view more and more; the decrepit structure of his state collapses under the pressure of its new obligations, and Emperor Napoleon today, amid the applause of Europe, takes up the very same program which a few years ago he made a crime in Emperor Nicholas. — Whatever his political reasons for this may be, every friend of mankind must nonetheless wish the undertaking success, insofar as it holds the remedy for the horrible oppression under which millions of Christians languish. Unfortunately, under present circumstances, this remedy recedes more and more, the more burning the Eastern Question becomes and the nearer the Turkish nationality feels itself to its downfall; for the protection which the European powers can offer their fellow believers is unable to keep pace with the rising fury of the Turks against them, and provokes and worsens more than it improves, etc."

After the pamphlet has developed these thoughts further in a striking manner and depicted the sorrowful helplessness of the Christians in the Orient, it continues:

"The European great powers play a sorry role toward Turkey, unworthy of their strength and of their moral as well as their intellectual stature; a hybrid role, disguised in the trappings of gendarme, advocate, and moral preacher, unedifying, without drastic effect, a mockery to the hardened sinner whom they would restrain and who, in the caution and irresolution of their bearing, sees only weakness, and in this weakness his own safety guaranteed. — European Turkey numbers, according to the figures of Henry Mattieu, in his excellent work "La Turquie et ses différents peuples," eight million nine hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom about six million six hundred and forty thousand are Christians: this majority, nearly three-quarters of the population, lives under the oppression of the remaining quarter in a state of bondage exceeding anything an overwrought imagination could conceive. Without even speaking of the Turkish authorities, who, despite the Congress of Paris and the Hatti-Humayun, will not let a Raja testify against a Muslim, yet make him pay dearly for his right to live and work — without mentioning the taxes, multiplied tenfold by the greed of the various layers of officials through which they must pass, that take from the destitute peasant his ox along with the