Still
more is it a question whether a regeneration can be effected, not by the
rise of a new spiritual idea (as in the case of the Koreish), but simply
by more perfect material appliances, and commercial prudence. History
gives no instance, it seems to me, of either case; and if our attempt to
regenerate Greece by freeing it has been an utter failure, much more, it
seems to me, would any such attempt fail in the case of the Turkish
race. For what can be done with a people which has lost the one great
quality which was the tenure of its existence, its military skill? Let
any one read the accounts of the Turkish armies in the fifteenth,
sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, when they were the tutors and
models of all Europe in the art of war, and then consider the fact that
those very armies require now to be officered by foreign adventurers, in
order to make them capable of even keeping together, and let him ask
himself seriously, whether such a fall can ever be recovered. When, in
the age of Theodosius, and again in that of Justinian, the Roman armies
had fallen into the same state; when the Italian legions required to be
led by Stilicho the Vandal, and the Byzantine by Belisar the Sclav and
Narses the Persian, the end of all things was at hand, and came; as it
will come soon to Turkey.
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