delivered: but I cannot refrain from saying here something more on this
matter; and that, first, because all political questions have their real
root in moral and spiritual ones, and not (as too many fancy) in
questions merely relating to the balance of power or commercial economy,
and are (the world being under the guidance of a spiritual, and not a
physical Being) finally decided on those spiritual grounds, and
according to the just laws of the kingdom of God; and, therefore, the
future political horoscope of the East depends entirely on the present
spiritual state of its inhabitants, and of us who have (and rightly)
taken up their cause; in short, on many of those questions on which I
have touched in these Lectures: and next, because I feel bound, in
justice to myself, to guard against any mistake about my meaning or
supposition that I consider the Turkish empire a righteous thing, or one
likely to stand much longer on the face of God's earth.

The Turkish empire, as it now exists, seems to me an altogether
unrighteous and worthless thing. It stands no longer upon the assertion
of the great truth of Islam, but on the merest brute force and
oppression. It has long since lost the only excuse which one race can
have for holding another in subjection; that which we have for taking on
ourselves the tutelage of the Hindoos, and which Rome had for its
tutelage of the Syrians and Egyptians; namely, the governing with
tolerable justice those who cannot govern themselves, and making them
better and more prosperous people, by compelling them to submit to law.
I do not know when this excuse is a sufficient one. God showed that it
was so for several centuries in the case of the Romans; God will show
whether it is in the case of our Indian empire: but this I say, that
the Turkish empire has not even that excuse to plead; as is proved by
the patent fact that the whole East, the very garden of the old world,
has become a desert and a ruin under the upas-blight of their