But there is no reason why the Turks should not share in such a renascence.[396] Their incivilisation is no more a matter of race character than the decline of the Moors or the backwardness of the Spaniards: it is the enforced result of the attitude of special enmity taken up towards the Turkish intruders from the first by all their Christian neighbours. By sheer force of outside pressure, co-operating with the sinister sway of the Sacred Book, Turkey has been kept fanatical, barbarous, uncultured, utterly militarist, and therefore financially misgoverned. The moral inferiority of the long-oppressed Christian peoples of the Levant, whose dishonesty was till lately proverbial, was such as to strengthen the Moslem in the conceit of superiority; while the need to maintain a relatively great military force as against dangerous neighbours has been for him a check upon all endowment of culture. To change all this, it needs that either force or prudence should so modify the system of government as to give freer course to industry and ideas; that the military system should be restricted; and that European knowledge should be brought to bear on education, till the fettering force of religion is frustrated, as in the progressive countries of Christendom. For Turkey and Spain, for Moslems and for Christians, the laws of progress and decadence are the same; and if only the more fortunate peoples can learn to help instead of hindering the backward, realising that every civilisation is industrially and intellectually an aid to every other, the future course of things may be blessedly different from that of the past. But the closest students of the past will doubtless be as a rule slow to predict such a transformation.[397] FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 374: Cp. the author's criticism of Dr. Pulszky, in _Buckle and his Critics_, p. 509.] [Footnote 375: Thus Milman decides that the Mahommedan civilisation is "the highest, it should seem, _attainable_ by the Asiatic _type of mind_" (_Latin Christianity_, 4th ed. ii, 222). This in the century which was to witness the renascence of Japan.] [Footnote 376: _Erânische Alterthumskunde_, 1871, i, 387.] [Footnote 377: _Id._ p. 388.] [Footnote 378: _Erânische Alterthumskunde_, p. 389.] [Footnote 379: Dr. Daremberg, writing on Cairo, "Impressions médicales," in the _Journal des Débats_, December 13, 1882, quoted by the K. Bikélas, as cited, tr. p. 100. Cp. Renan's language as to "l'_esprit_ sémitique, sans étendue, sans diversité, sans arts plastiques, sans philosophie, sans mythologie, sans _vie politique_, sans progrès" (_Études d'histoire religieuse_, 1862, p. 67).]