Page:Note of an English republican on the Muscovite crusade (IA noteofenglishrep00swiniala).pdf/13

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ON THE MUSCOVITE CRUSADE.
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and peace anarchic populations all over their side of the world.' To what manner of God and what type of man, if there be any reader that remembers not, yet Hungary remembers and Poland knows; to the God of the worshippers of Moloch, and to men of the kindred of his priests. But in this case, when 'the Czar, whose serious task it is to protect the Christian subjects in Turkey proper,' shall practically have established his most righteous 'claim to territorial footing in the recovered country,' then 'the peaceful Mongol inhabitants' will 'of course be left in peace, and treated with perfect equity, and even friendly consideration.' Of course they will: about this at least there can be no debate possible among honest men—men as strictly 'honest and just, who have such noble sense of their friends' wrongs,' as even Czar Alexander and Ancient Iago themselves. The man who could doubt this might be capable of doubting the sacred word of an emperor or the plighted honour of a king. Seriously let me ask, for what imaginable or imaginary class of readers can such a sentence as this be written? Mr. Carlyle has shewn himself always the greatest and sometimes the uncleanliest of all great English humourists since Swift; but the gravely indecent irony of this hideous jest might have disconcerted Aristophanes and made Rabelais think twice.

If then we are to cast in our lot on either side in this proposed crusade, we need surely to consider the blazon on the shield of its leader, the watchword on its preacher's lips. It is certainly not from the very humblest follower or obscurest private in the