“The most ferocious, cruel, barbarous, ignorant, prof-
ligate, and abandoned miscreants that ever cursed
Europe.” (A Scotsman’s view of the Turks)

On Wednesday night, Crosby Hall was filled by a numerous and most fashionable audience, to listen to a lecture by Mr Percy. B. St. John on the eastern question. Mr St. John entered into an outline of the designs and views of Russia, pointing her out-intriguing against us in the east, professing deep interest for the Greeks under the sway of the Turks, and approaching Constantinople with rapid strides. So powerful was the Tzar, so weak the Turk, that the Ottoman empire existed only only by the sufferance of England and France who were compelled to spend money to send fleets and prepare armies to to battle for the cause. This could not go on for ever. We could not be eternally risking war for another country. We could not everlastingly support this worn out idea, the integrity of Turkey. Mr St. John entered into very considerable detail to prove that no such thing as civilization existed in Turkey. The Turks had no arts, no literature; knew not how to read or write; talked about toleration, and published firmans, but never carried them into effect; they were, in fact, to use the words of a Scotch traveller, “The most ferocious, cruel, barbarous, ignorant, profligate, and abandoned miscreants that ever cursed Europe.” Their armies existed chiefly on paper; a few picked soldiers excepted, they had nothing but a rabble rout of boys, raw undisciplined, and totally incapable of contending with regular forces. Their navy was a farce for Turks were not and never could be sailors. Without Greeks they could not sail a ship. Their government was a black and benighted tyranny, their credit weak, their treasury empty. All that was left for Europe to do was to give Consantinople up to the Russians, divide the land, or reconstruct the the empire, not by means of the savage military minority. Was it forgotten that in Turkey - in Europe - existed seven millions of Christian Greeks, the descendants of the men of old to whom we owe so much in art, in literature, in science - men who kept up the Turkish empire by their industry, by their intelligence, by their patience, their capacity, who were the merchants, the mechanics, the tradesmen, the sailors, the men, in fact, of the empire. This race was utterly excluded from all power - it was a state of abject slavery. And yet it had, in independent Greece, proved its capacity for freedom. The Greek merchants in London, all Turkish subjects, were men of high intellect, honour and integrity. On the one hand was a falling empire, barbarous, ignorant degraded; on the other hand a noble Christian race, brave, patriotic and thoroughly capable of forming an empire that could be the outpost of civilization and Christianity in Europe. Mr St. John said in conclusion - ‘I have thrown out these hasty hints, the outpourings of an earnest and devoted friend of Hellas, without any pretension to originality on my part. If I have summoned you together to hear a solution on the eastern question, it is not that I have found one. Poets, philosophers, statesmen have dreamed this glorious dream before me But in this cause of that nation whose language I first learned to read, to whom I owe such ennobling delights, such happy hours, in the society of whose glorious ancestors I have spent such days of rapt delight, listening to the voice now of solemn and heroic prose, now of wonderous philosophy, I could not remain silent. Greece may find, has found, and will find again, abler, more eloquent, more learned, more influential champions; but she will never find one more attached to that sacred soil where poets say, where historians wrote and heroes fought for the edification of the world.” Mr St.John concluded amid loud cheers by an appeal to the sympathies of free and Christian England and the devotion of the Greeks themselves’

‘On Monday, before a very full audience at the Lecture Hall in Greenwich, and on Wednesday at the Whittington Club, Mr Percy B. St.John delivered his lecture in favour of the restoration of the Christian Greek empire. The address which was full of anecdotes, some of a very humorous character, and which entered far more fully than that of last week into the actual condition of Turkey and the Turks, was very well received. Mr St.John attempted to prove first, that Russia and the Moslem being now about to continue their struggle for mastery over Constantinople, the time had come for the Christian nations of the earth to step in, and restore that fair city to its rightful owners, who were the majority,who were already the the architects, merchants, traders, artisans &etc though excluded from all rank, civil, military and naval. Mr St.John has left for Manchester, to continue his crusade against the Turks.’

Mr Percy B.St John delivered a lecture on Wednesday evening on the ‘Restoration of the Greek Empire.’ The room was crowded and amongst the audience we noted most of the Greek residents of the town, who evinced great interest in the subject, and frequently applauded the sentiments of the address. Mr St John concluded his lecture with the announcement that he had received an anonymous letter, accusing him of being in the pay of the Manchester Greeks, a charge which he indignantly denied’

“On Wednesday evening, Mr Percy B.St John delivered a lecture at the Royal assembly-rooms, Great George Street, on the present crisis of affairs in Turkey, in its reference to the interests of commerce, justice and Christianity. The attendance was numerous and respectable. The events of the last few years, he said, and still more of the last few days, had opened the eyes of the British public and of the civilized world to the necessity of a permanent positive solution to the Eastern Question. Russia had more than ever unmasked her ambitious designs, and Turkey had proved her total inability to oppose the power. It was evident that something more was required than merely driving back the Russians, Turks were daily decreasing, and the cry was now raised for Greek emancipation. Some people thought the Greeks had been emancipated. Only about one million out of ten or twelve millions had received emancipation. The remainder were left in bondage. The great faults found with the Greeks was that we lent them money and they have not paid back the principle nor the interest to the full extent. It was a well known fact that not a single penny of the money that was sent to Greece ever went into the pocket of a Greek or was made use of for any useful purpose. It was spent on a band of janissaries who surrounded the king, and was the power that upheld him during his ten years of despotism. It was scarcely just to ask that Greece in 20 years should attain a position equal to that of countries which had existed for centuries, the mere fact of a nation having only one million of population, having very small resources and having to create everything, army, navy, commerce,was sufficient sufficient to prove that at least half a century would be required for a fair trial. It was a mistake to suppose that the Greeks were friendly to the Russians, though they certainly view this kind of despotism with less alarm than the one under which they are presently suffering. The only fair excuse for its being said that the Greeks have sympathy for the Russian was in the similarity of their religion. But because the Russians had taken their religion form the Greeks, it was no reason why they should attempt to get possession of the Greeks themselves. The Greeks hate the despotism of Russia as much as the Turks. To check the progress of Russia it was necessary to reconstruct the Greek empire at Constantinople.
As matters at present stood, the Eastern question, thanks to Russian ambition and Turkish weakness, would ever be a constantly recurring difficulty, and, in his idea, its only and ultimate solution could be the re-establishment of the throne of Constantine in thin place of the divan and the formation of a strong, powerful Greek Christian empire. In conclusion, Mr St. John alluded to anonymous letter he had received, charging him with being the paid agent of the Manchester Greeks. This he indignantly denied. He had ever taken a great interest in Greece; ten years ago he was the secretary of the Phillhellenic Society in London and though an Englishman, Greek was the first language in which he had ever learned to read, (loud applause)

‘Last evening a meeting was held at Crosby Hall, Bishopsgate Street, the notice convening that it would be composed of “the friends of Greece,’ About 150 persons were present, principally foreigners, and a portion of them ladies. The Earl of Harrington had been invited to preside, but it was stated that he had declined, and that he required a declaration that the persons calling the meeting were not partisans of Russia.

The Rev’ Mr HERBERT was thereupon called to the chair and he said the object of the meeting was the promotion, by pacific means of the cause of Christianity as against the Crescent. By pacific means he meant diplomatic means, or means analogous thereto. They were not all desirous of promoting the designs of the Russians, but they wished to promote the formation of a Christian empire in the east, having Constantinople for its capital.

Mr Percy St. John then addressed the meeting. He enlarged at considerable length upon the state of the Turkish empire, which he described as being in an abject and degraded condition. Since 1821 Turkey had ceased to take an active part in the world; it was a protected state upheld by the commiseration of the great powers of Europe. It had no army, and no navy worth the name. The population of European Turkey consisted of eleven million of Christians and three millions of Turks. The merchants, the cultivators, the men who did all the work, were the Greeks, but the Turks tyrannized over them. The Greeks naturally looked up to Russia as the only power they had offered to protect them. He thought, however, they were wrong in this, for if Russia got possession of Constantinople the Greeks would fall under a despotism worse than that under which they suffered. He thought that at the present moment it was the duty of England to prevent the Russians from arriving at Constantinople.

and that the only mode by which they could oppose the aggression of Russia was by the establishment of another power that would complete with Russia. He moved the resolution that an association be formed under the name of the Eastern Christian League, to disseminate information regarding, and to excite the sympathy of England on behalf of the suffering Christian of the Levant.

Mr SHIRLEY HIBBERT seconded, and the CHAIRMAN declared it carried.

MR HORACE ST JOHN then moved another resolution, that the sympathy of the country is due to the eastern Christians; and MR ANDREW RIGOPOLOUS, a Greek, in seconding it; said the Greeks intended to finish the revolution they began in 1821, and they could settle it with Turkey if other nations would not interfere.

MR.STOKHENE then addressed the meting. He contended that a great deal was to be said for Turkey — that its government wad not more tyrannical than other governments, that it saved Kossuth from death, and he stated that if any change was made there ought to be a republic in Turkey.

The resolution passed with half-a-dozen dissidents; and another resolution appointing a committee was also agreed to.

The usual vote of thanks to the chairman wound up the proceedings.

Before Vice-Chancellor Sir John Stuart

ST. JOHN V ALEXANDRIDES - THE EASTERN STAR

The plaintiff in this suite was Mr Percy Bolinbroke St.John, the well-known author, and the defendant was Pericles Rostopulos Alexandrides. The suit having been insinuated, this was a motion for the injunction to restrain the defendant from selling the type used in printing the ‘Eastern Star, a newspaper recently established in London for the purpose of advocating the independence of the Greeks from Turkish dominion. The motion also asked that the defendant might be restrained from interfering with the publication of the above newspaper. The defendant did not appear, though he had been served with a notice of the motion.

The court made the order.

Mr Percy.B. St.John gave another lecture at the Athenaeum, last evening on this project. There were thirty or forty persons present, mostly foreigners. He remarked the surprising progress which this ides had made in the public opinion of England during the last two or three weeks. Some months back, if any person entertaining it, was only as a poetic dream; now they were beginning to regard it as the only practical solution to the question. The general impression, till lately was, that Greece had been freed thirty years ago, at the end of the seven years’ struggle in which Lord Byron took part. But , in fact, it was only a small portion of the Greek people who were allowed by the diplomats of the day to recover their freedom - only one million out of ten millions. England empathized with the Greeks, who, poor and half armed, had freed themselves from a cruel bondage; but now, because their experiment of independent Greece had not perfectly succeeded, there were some who would bid us withdraw that sympathy. Greece began as an independent state, with only a million inhabitants, with a country exhausted by seven years of a bloody war, without money, with an extemporized constitution, and worse than all, with a king of 15 years old, imposed on Greece by a foreign diplomacy; the Greeks had few men of experience to govern them, roads yet to be made, a navy to be created, a finance to be formed; the new state had every disadvantage to contend against, with fields untilled, ruined houses, and no manufactures; nothing but noble energetic hearts. We lent the Greeks money, for which they were often reproached; but did ever one penny of it go into the hands of the Greek? Was it spent in making roads, or building schools, or promoting the interests of the Greek people? It went to pay a horde of Janissaries, to support a vile and ignominious tyranny, which the people put an end to in 1843, and since that date we had seen Greece making immense progress, to justify the enthusiasm which England had shown on their behalf, and which, it was to be hoped, England would now show again for others of the Hellenic race who still remained in bondage. Sufficient was known of what had already been done by Greece in the last ten years, especially the great extension of her trade, to substantiate this claim. I t was curious to see the change which was now coming over public opinion. A few weeks ago, all the sympathies of England were on the side of the Turks; but we were now finding that we were defending in the Turkish empire, something so worthless and contemptible, that, if Russian designs were to be opposed, something else must be set up in Constantinople. The news in the papers of today, of the conspiracy against the Turkish Sultan, showed the utter hopelessness of regenerating the Turkish empire. What Russia wanted, on the other side, was to absorb the Greek population of Turkey into her own system, under the pretense that they belonged to the great Slavonic empire , the head of which was St.Petersburg. This was a false and insidious plea; and it was equally false that, because the Greeks happened to be of the same religion as the Russians, the czar should be their Pope, and not only that, but their protector and temporal sovereign; the fact was that the Eastern or Greek church was divided into five separate portions, of which the church having its head at St.Petersburg was the least important, and the church of Constantinople the most important.

We know that in some of its material interests, European Turkey might have a favourable change in coming into the hands of Russian; at least, it could not be worse than it was; but the Greeks did not feel any sympathy with Russia; he did not believe there was any one Greek so base as to wish to exchange even his present slavery for the yoke of another despot. He did not ask, now, that a single English musket should be sent to help the Greeks; but that, when they all rose to demand their liberty, the English government should extend the same sympathy which they had lately been giving to the barbarian Moslem, and prevent Russia fro m interfering, and let the Greeks settle with the Turks their own affairs. Turkey, naturally the finest and richest country in Europe, was most wretched under the Ottoman rule; there was not a road in the country, and in some districts not one-tenth was cultivated; and large plains, near the capital, were abandoned to pestilential effluvia. Wherever a pasha fixed his residence the people fled; the way from Adrianople to Constantinople passed though the cemeteries of the dead; in one locality was a monument erected of three thousand skulls, of the Christian people of a certain province, who were massacred because they resisted the enormous exactions of the tax-gatherer; and it was not so many years ago, but that the hair might still be seen on their scalps. In the capital city itself the population was steadily decreasing; the streets of the city were in worse order than they used to be; and there was no improvement, except that now they scarcely dared to kill the Christians, but would spit on them, and insult them everywhere. The Turks were now eagerly awaiting for the opportunity to massacre the Christian population; letters had been received by persons both in London and Manchester, within the last few days, which proved the fact. After mentioning some instances of the gross ignorance of the Turks, the lecturer described the corruption of their provincial government, the enormous bribery practiced in all official situations, from the highest to the lowest, and their abuses in the administration of justice; he related some anecdotes of the prevalence of false testimony and partiality in the civil courts, which we need not repeat, since they resembled very much the cases narrated by Mr Julius Jeffreys, last week, as having occurred in the civil courts of our Indian dominion, a report of which we have given, Mr St.John observed that a true civilization could exist without a true and humanizing religion. The Mabommetan was a religion of beasts — fit for a race of monkeys - and not of men, for it denied to women the possession of a soul, excluded her from future hope, and shut her up, during this life, in a merely animal existence.

Education there was none; the boy was taught by some priests to snuffle over a few passages of the Koran, but any science, history, geography, even arithmetic, was out of the question; and, up to a certain age, the young Turk was bought up in the harem, by the women and slaves. It was a mistake to suppose that slavery had been abolished in Turkey; within the last six months, cargoes of Ciccassian slaves had been bought to Constantinople in steamers, and, if not sold in the slave market, sold in private houses. He spoke with much disgust of the brutish and filthy state of these poor women, imported to be made the playthings of mischievous barbarians; a description equally repulsive and more circumstantial than that which the lecturer gave, we have lately found in a book just published by his brother, Mr Bayle St.John, entitled “The Turks in Europe” After mentioning the frequency of infanticide and the regular decrease of the Turkish population, nothwithstanding those bought in from Asia, he said their military power raised by forced enlistment, was quite inefficacious; they had only been formidable as an undisciplined force; and their navy had been destroyed at Navarino. The pretended reforms in Turkey of late years had been without any good result, only creating two parties; the one, who wished to adopt European civilization and wore Frankish clothes,might be termed the party of the tight trousers; and the others who held onto the principles of the Koran and that of propagating their faith by the sword, were the party of the loose trousers; they hate each other mortally. It might be asked should these people be exterminated. No, not if they were the worst barbarians on earth; but they should not be allowed to rule over ten or twelve millions of enlightened and energetic Christian people; they might either remain unmolested, as the Turks in independent Greece now did,or return to Asia, and endeavour to reconstruct the Turkish empire in its original seat. The Greeks were ready to oppose Russia ,if their independence were to be secured; they would form a barrier against the encroachments of the Moscovite power; and having preserved their religion and nationality through a bondage of 400 years, they were deserving of esteem and sympathy.’

   HELLENIC ASSOCIATION^[3].

We have great pleasure in giving publicity to the following, which has been placed before us:- At a meeting held at No 4, Burlington-gardens, June 20th, 1844, the following resolutions were unanimously adopted: - 1. -That it is desirable that a Society should be formed for the promotion of education in Greece. 2. That in furtherance of this object it is desirable to appoint a Provisional Committee, with power to add to their numbers. 3. That the following Gentlemen do form the said Committee : - W. Harrison Ainsworth, Esq.; William Lloyd Birkbeck, Esq.; Dr. Bowring,. M.P.; A. B. Cochrane, Esq., M.P.; the Right Honourable Lord FrancIs Egerton, M.P.; Major Sir Cornwallis Harris; Dr. Hodgkin; Captain Septimus Hart; A. C. lonides, Esq.; Walter K. Kelly, Esq., Colonel Martin Leake; Sir Samuel Rush Mayrick K.H,; R. Monckton Milnes, Esq, M P.; James Augustus St. John, Esq.; Percy, B. St. John, Esq.; Honourable Colonel. Leicester Stanhope; J. Emerson. Tennent, Esq. M.P. 4. That the following gentlemen be requested to accept the office of Honorary Secretaries' - Neocles G. Mussabini, -Esq.,7, Finsbury-circus; Bayle St John, Esq.; 9 North Bank, St.John’s-wood. 5. That James Augustus St. John Esq.; the Honourable Colonel Leicester Stanhope; Dr Bowring, M.P,; Neocles G.Mussabini, Esq.; and Bayle St. John, Esq.; be requested to draw up a prospectus of the general plan of such an association. The following resolutions were adopted on the 6th of July: -- A. B, Cochrane, Esq., MP.; in the chair. I. That the names of Dr. Hawtrey and Walter Savage Landor Esq;, be added to the list of the committee. 2. That the proceedings of the committee a the meeting held 20th June be printed and circulated among the members of the committee. 3, That the amended prospectus of the plan of the Association be adopted. 4. That this prospectus be translated into Geek, and when printed, with its translation, be circulated among the members of the committee. 6. That Mr, Cochrane take charge of the prospectus, for the purpose of conferring with influential parties in Greece on the plan and purposes of the Association, The following is the Prospectus: —

It has been deemed desirable by many friends of Greece to form, under the name of The Hellenic Association, a society for the promotion of education in that country. Gratitude to the Greeks, for the benefits which as a people they have conferred upon mankind, is the leading motive in which this project has originated; and it is hoped that in proportion as men have profited by the lessons of wisdom and virtue taught by the ancient Greeks, will be their desire to repay to the present generation what they owe to its ancestors. The object which the Hellenic Association seeks to accomplish is, to introduce into Greece an improved system of education which will embrace the moral sciences, mechanics, agriculture, and the useful arts generally. To effect this purpose, it proposes to raise sufficient funds, by annual subscriptions and donations, which are to be placed under the control of the Association. The youths to be educated by the Hellenic Association. are to be selected by the University of Athens; the expenses of their voyage to and from England, of their maintenance, Clothing &c., while here, to be defrayed by the Association. in whole, or in part, according to circumstances. The Association will to the utmost of its power, watch over the the youths entrusted to its care, so that, at the close of the term of their education. they may be restored to their parents and country, improved as well in character as in knowledge. Their religious beliefs will in no wise be interfered with; and as members or all the great parties in the British empire are already and continue to be members of the committee, the public may be said to have in this circumstance a guarantee that no particular political bias will be attempted to be given to their minds. The general outline is submitted to the consideration of the friends of Greece, but the project will be modified or extended when the funds can be more accurately ascertained. The field of usefulness is indeed wide-limited by the means which may be placed at the disposal of the Association. Under the impression that much ought to be done - the conviction that much may be done - and the assurance that something will be done - for so great, and interesting an object,'this earnest appeal is made to the British public.