Home and Foreign Parts
Adelaide, January 1913

Home and Foreign Parts.

No. I.

(By H. Reick, for the “Examiner.”)

Yours truly (now in Adelaide on tour to the war-endangered southern parts of Europe) went in 1866 down the Danube River to the Black Sea, and thence overland through Besarabia and New Russia to Odessa. It was at the time when the States Walachia and Moldavia turned free from Turkish and Russian influence and became the Kingdom of Roumania under the sceptre and good government of Carol I. As at that time, 1866, war raged between Austria and Prussia, it was very difficult for me to travel through the Austrian and Hungarian Lands to reach the Danube Principalities: Wallachia, Moldavia, Bosnia, Serbia and Bulgaria, inhabitated by a population of very different nationalities, languages, religions, under the feudal rule of local big landowners and biassed by different political and religious fanatical influences, and without strong orderly protection for life and property.

By nature the workers of the soil all over the globe are law-abiding, kind, honest and moral, however rough they may appear; and in this respect are quite unlike the apparently-refined classes in crowded cities and their near suburbs. But, as the following fact as an illustration will prove, they are inclined to be suspicious against dwellers in adjacent districts, especially in these Danube principalities and in the Balkan mountains. As I informed my hosts north of the Danube of my intention to cross this river and, for a change, travel along the southern, then Turkish shore, I was earnestly warned against going amongst the people on the other side of the water, as they were “dangerous unbelievers and throat-cuts.” But after a few days travelling amongst the good farming population on the southern Serisian and Bosnian shore, in peace and comfort, I was warned against the “barbarous and treacherous” Hungarians and Wallachians, where a few days ago I came from, quite unhurt. By a fanatical press, schools and pulpits the good people in these Levantine parts of Europe have been set at loggerheads, one against the others.

Like in old feudal times in the northern European Continent, the lands in all these, then Turkish, parts were owned only by noblemen—in Turkey by Mohamedans (Beys). Lower Mohamedans were soldiers, police, priests or beggars; while the Israelites and Greeks were merchants and owners of the moneys. All subjects of the Turkish Empire were called Osmans. The working classes, especially the farming classes and lessees of land, were called Radjas, and consisted mostly of Greek Catholics. In ancient times when the Mohamedan Lord (Bey) used to live, like a father, amongst his bondsmen as one of themselves in a patriarchal style, the Christian lessees became reconciled with the ceremonies of the Islam religion, changed their Christian forms of the worship of the Almighty with the Massu’[?man],

fought fanatically and successfully the battles of this then prospering Wolf religion against the Christian European nations, who were in these times, more or less by their wealthy clergy, turned into defenceless meek sheep.

In those times of grey antiquity, when the Levant Trade from China, India, via Arabia fructified the then barbarous northern Europe, the Crescent was then victorious and governed cruelly over the Cross, and the Asiatic Turkmenes and Saracenes advanced far northwards, got enormously wealthy, and cultivated arts and sciences.

When America began to be populated and navigation to India around the Cape of Good Hope was found out, then slowly through the centuries the Colonial trade got alive; and in the same degree of its progress, the old Levant trade, with its traffic up the Danube and via Venice and Genoa, across the Alps, became almost forgotten till in its present time, in consequence of the opening of the Suez Canal, this old Levant traffic and trade gets slowly alive again.

The Crimean War, as we all know, was fought by England and France in vain to keep Russia from Constantinople, which by this reawakening Levant trade, attracted the eyes of the Commercial World. And at the present time we see in the lands down the Danube and across the Balkan mountains, the impoverished cheap workers: The Levantines, Greeks, Bulgarians, Rûmanes, Herzegovinians; even the far away Armenians, Caucasians, Drusians, Kurdistanians draw at present their sharpest attention on the high wage-earners in the modern parts of the Globe. Not only the working men of Europe, America and Australia wake up; not only the Japanese and Chinese, but also the poor, cheap land-labourers, hitherto oppressed by the Mohamedan landlords, the Beys and Pashas in the South East of Europe, get drawn into the vortex of Liberty and Progress.

When we—wife and I—a few years ago were for many weeks living on the island of Ceylon, we saw a large stone building in progress of erection. Accustomed, as Australians are, of seeing the modern way to draw up large and heavy pieces of building material and also men, by steam power on thin steel ropes, we perceived with astonishment in the Ceylonese metropole Kandy, huge stones, etc., in the ancient style drawn up by many dozens of hands of almost naked Cinghalese, male and female, old and young, pulling hard, each of a part of the hoisting cable. After expressing to the European overseer my astonishment to perceive here, on British soil such ancient methods of labour, and describing proudly our Australian style, this gentleman, after letting me finish my “sermon,” explained to me that each of these poor naked workers got 25 cents (about 4½d) per day wages, whereon they could live quite jolly in this paradisian island; but if for such work steam was introduced, all these poor creatures, born Britishers, would have to hunger and simply die; therefore the sharp, sudden progress was here kept back by the British authorities, out of sheer humanity. How differently to this mode has been the development of progress amongst the poor workers in the above described south-eastern lands of Europe.

In the Crimean War young English noblemen, at that time born military officers, got into intimate comradeship with the young off-spring of the then allied Mohamedan nobility (Beys, Pashas, etc.), and after this long terrible war, the youth of the British Isles, invited by their then Mohamedan friends, saw on the estates of their hosts the very primitive labour by bondsmen and lessees, etc., of the Osman Empire. The young European lords, of course, laughed at the ridiculous antiquated field work; and the young Turkish Beys, after having repaid their visits in Northern Europe, persuaded their parental Pashas; and after growing older themselves, introduced modern machinery, thereby saving labour, discharged the workers and changed their rustic life into the modern ways of their North European and American rich friends, spending the growing land-rent in high style in Paris, Monte Carlo, Biarritz, etc. The elevating study of statesmanship, national economy, law, sciences then in Turkey unknown; and in feudal style, the right to gather taxes from the workers of the lands and other producers of values was licensed to the highest bidder by the Turkish Lords, and if these lords (Mohamedan Beys) in foreign parts got short of cash, the “tax screw” was more and more pressed on labourers and bondsmen. When the tax gatherers reported about desperation and threatening mutiny of the oppressed, these governing lords began to howl: “Why have we the Sultan and the Janitjar troops?—let the Janitjars be sent in contribution to the mutineering villages . . . . !”

The readers of this paper will remember the reports of the cruel invasions of Mohamedan, Kurdish and Grusian bands of soldiery upon the Christian workers and landholders in the latter fifty years. Christians belonging to the Greek Catholic Church, who held their hands up for help towards the head of their Church: the Czar of Russia and the Russian nation.

The kind reader may in the above related reminiscences of my journeys in the Danube and Balkan countries, and during my stay in Odessa, find a key to explain the earlier and later upheavals and wars in these parts upon which at present all eyes of the Commercial and Diplomatic World so very keenly are directed.

Adelaide, January, 1913.   H. Reick.