Harvard Classics Volume 28: Essays English and American
General
Harvard Classics Volume 28: Essays English and American
American essays; English essays
the time, rather like the dream of a professor who has run wild with an
ethnological craze, than like the serious thought of a practical man of
any nation. Yet the Magyar students seem to have meant their address
quite seriously. And the Turkish general, if he did not take it
seriously, at least thought it wise to shape his answer as if he did.
As a piece of practical politics, it sounds like Frederick Barbarossa
threatening to avenge the defeat of Crassus upon Saladin, or like the
French of the revolutionary wars making the Pope Pius of those days
answerable for the wrongs of Vercingetorix. The thing sounds like
comedy, almost like conscious comedy. But it is a kind of comedy which
may become tragedy, if the idea from which it springs get so deeply
rooted in men's minds as to lead to any practical consequences. As
long as talk of this kind does not get beyond the world of hot-headed
students, it may pass for a craze. It would be more than a craze, if
it should be so widely taken up on either side that the statesmen on
either side find it expedient to profess to take it up also.
To allege the real or supposed primeval kindred between Magyars and
Ottomans as a ground for political action, or at least for political
sympathy, in the affairs of the present moment, is an extreme
case--some may be inclined to call it a _reductio ad absurdum_--of a
whole range of doctrines and sentiments which have in modern days
gained a great power over men's minds. They have gained so great a
power that those who may regret their influence cannot afford to
despise it. To make any practical inference from the primeval kindred
of Magyar and Turk is indeed pushing the doctrine of race, and of
sympathies arising from race, as far as it well can be pushed. Without
plunging into any very deep mysteries, without committing ourselves to
any dangerous theories in the darker regions of ethnological inquiry,
we may perhaps be allowed at starting to doubt whether there is any
real primeval kindred between the Ottoman and the Finnish Magyar. It
is for those who have gone specially deep into the antiquities of the
non-Aryan races to say whether there is or is not. At all events, as
far as the great facts of history go, the kindred is of the vaguest and
most shadowy kind. It comes to little more than the fact that Magyars
and Ottomans are alike non-Aryan invaders who have made their way into
Europe within recorded times, and that both have, rightly or wrongly,
been called by the name of Turks. These do seem rather slender grounds
on which to build up a fabric of national sympathy between two nations,
when several centuries of living practical history all pull the other
way. It is hard to believe that the kindred of Turk and Magyar was
thought of when a Turkish pacha ruled at Buda. Doubtless Hungarian
Protestants often deemed, and not unreasonably deemed, that the
contemptuous toleration of the Moslem sultan was a lighter yoke than
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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