p. 255 | TURKEY'S SICK-BED

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 10, 1880

TURKEY'S SICK-BED.

The "Sick Man" has fallen so low with the disease of his religious faith and his unreligious practices, his squanderings of the money wrung from the poor people who unfortunately are his subjects, while the obligations of his Government are ignored or neglected—in fine, he is so low on a political couch that it resembles a death-bed, and he a corpse, that the Signatory Powers have found it necessary to come to an understanding in his case, and they have agreed upon a meeting of their representatives to make a political diagnosis of the case and prescribe a bolus for the cure. Turkey is politically sick—very sick. She has neither money nor credit, neither the power to pay her debts, nor apparently the desire to do so. She would not exist to-day as a Power in Europe had not the Signatory Powers intervened just as Russia was hammering away at the gates of Constantinople. Jealousy of Russia saved Turkey. In a month or two more, if not interfered with, Russia would have blotted the name of Turkey from the map of Europe, as it should have been. But she was saved, upon condition of performing certain stipulations, which she agreed to fulfill, and which she immediately determined not to fulfill, and has not.

She has not kept faith with Greece, nor Montenegro, nor with any other Power. And she fails in all her professed purposes. Without money and without credit, the business of her Sultan is to squander money obtained by any possible means, to maintain his seraglio in splendor, while his subjects starve; and his Pashas use their opportunities and their authority to grow rich by their system of enforced collection of taxes. Germany, which has been holding back, has at length agreed to hold a conference in common with the other Signatory Powers, but requiring that a definite programme shall be prepared before the conference takes place. They will be the conference which shall hold its consultation over the "Sick Man." And they agree beforehand that what they decide upon must be done, and, if military force shall be required in Turkey to ensure the carrying out of the work they agree upon as necessary, each of the Plenary Powers must furnish its complement. Turkey, most likely, will ere long furnish a repetition of the dismemberment of Poland. Nothing but the mutual jealousies of several of the Powers can prevent this result. Turkey is doomed, and civilization has no reason to sorrow over it.—Alta.