Harvard Classics Volume 28: Essays English and American
General
Harvard Classics Volume 28: Essays English and American
American essays; English essays
which, as it was proverbially said, his body was in bondage to the Turk
and his soul in bondage to the Greek. But we may suspect that this
neatly turned proverb dates only from the awakening of a distinctly
national Bulgarian feeling in modern times. The Turk was felt to be an
intruder and an enemy, because his rule was that of an open oppressor
belonging to another creed. The Greek, on the other hand, though his
spiritual dominion brought undoubted practical evils with it, was not
felt to be an intruder and an enemy in the same sense. His quicker
intellect and superior refinement made him a model. The Bulgarian
imitated the Greek tongue and Greek manners; he was willing in other
lands to be himself looked on as a Greek. It is only in quite modern
times, under the direct influence of the preaching of the doctrine of
race, that a hard and fast line has been drawn between Greeks and
Bulgarians. That doctrine has cut two ways. It has given both
nations, Greek and Bulgarian alike, a renewed national life, national
strength, national hopes, such as neither of them had felt for ages.
In so doing, it has done one of the best and most hopeful works of the
age. But in so doing, it has created one of the most dangerous of
immediate political difficulties. In calling two nations into a
renewed being, it has arrayed them in enmity against each other, and
that in the face of a common enemy in whose presence all lesser
differences and jealousies ought to be hushed into silence.
There is then a distinct doctrine of race, and of sympathies founded on
race, distinct from the feeling of community of religion, and distinct
from the feeling of nationality in the narrower sense. It is not so
simple or easy a feeling as either of those two. It does not in the
same way lie on the surface; it is not in the same way grounded on
obvious facts which are plain to every man's understanding. The
doctrine of race is essentially an artificial doctrine, a learned
doctrine. It is an inference from facts which the mass of mankind
could never have found out for themselves; facts which, without a
distinctly learned teaching, could never be brought home to them in any
intelligible shape. Now what is the value of such a doctrine? Does it
follow that, because it is confessedly artificial, because it springs,
not from a spontaneous impulse, but from a learned teaching, it is
therefore necessarily foolish, mischievous, perhaps unnatural? It may
perhaps be safer to hold that like many other doctrines, many other
sentiments, it is neither universally good nor universally bad, neither
inherently wise nor inherently foolish. It may be safer to hold that
it may, like other doctrines and sentiments, have a range within which
it may work for good, while in some other range it may work for evil.
It may in short be a doctrine which is neither to be rashly accepted,
nor rashly cast aside, but one which may need to be guided, regulated,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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