merchant and depresses commerce, the Aga pillages the cultivator of the soil, and destroys the habits of industry of the rural population. These last will not grow valuable produce, as they lose their gains through exaction and robbery, and their labour, toil, and anxiety are thus thrown away; the cultivation consequently is at last reduced to the production of those perishable commodities which afford the bare means of subsistence, and offer no temptation to the cupidity of persons in power. Sometimes, however, the very grain about to be sown in the ground is seized, and when the inhabitants, driven to desperation from absolute hunger and want, at last rebel, and utter their complaints so loudly that they reach the throne of Constantinople, the opportunity is gladly seized to depose or bowstring the greedy Pasha, and to do justice to the people by pocketing the accumulated wealth of the greedy governor! Thus they pretend to do justice to the despoiled subject, by acting a most ridiculous and unprincipled farce. A man who has been robbed calls on a third party to assist him in obtaining redress; the individual appealed to knocks down the robber, pockets the money himself, and wishes good morning to the party deprived of his property. This is Turkish justice and Turkish re

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dress. As for law, there is none in the country; it is pretended that a code of laws exists founded on the precepts of the Koran, the examples and opinions of Mahomet, and the precepts of the first four Caliphs, digested together in a large volume called the Multeka, which is expounded and explained by the learned doctors of the Ulema,—an absurd bundle of obscure maxims and precepts, which form no rule of justice or standard of equity to regulate the dealings between man and man. They form no guarantee for the protection of private rights, of personal security, or of private property, to which the oppressed subject can appeal, or which can form any barrier to the cupidity and avarice of a local governor. Under this vicious system of government every thing declines-industry, literature, arts, and science; and the present Turks remain in the same state of benighted ignorance as their ancestors were in, first passed the banks of the Oxus. The petty governors of the villages, up to the Pasha of three horse-tails, are frequently taken from the dregs of society, and the mass of the people being perfectly uneducated, ignorance pervades every office and every department of the government. God has indeed "thrown dust into the eyes of the rulers of Turkey," or they would have seen the inevitable

when they

tendency of their vicious and unprincipled mode of government; but these people never look beyond the passing day, and what the country may come to after they are gone, is to them of very little consequence.

The regeneration of Turkey appears perfectly hopeless; the whole structure of society is vicious to a degree, and the religious fanaticism of the people presents an almost insuperable barrier to improvement.

The description of authority to which they have been so long subject has completely relaxed the nerves and deadened the energies of the nation. A long system of bad government has now done its work; the whole population has become demoralized, rottenness has crept through every fibre and sinew of their vast empire, and with the best government and the best measures it would be a difficult and a tedious task to stir up the population to habits of industry-to excite their dormant energies, and make them feel those common impulses to exertion which stimulate the mass in every prosperous community. The only hope of amendment would be with the rising generation. The government must take the initiative, and inculcate habits of industry by finding means of employment for the younger classes, and they must

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hold out inducements and rewards to stimulate them to exertion. The absurd and pernicious doctrines of the Koran seem to present a barrier to the advancement of all those who tenaciously adhere to them, and apparently have a tendency to retain all nations professing Mahometanism in a state of ignorance and barbarism. The doctrine that the lot and circumstances of all mankind are marked out from their birth upwards, by the inevitable decree of fate, is most destructive to individual and national advancement; the prohibiting all communication with infidels, and the inculcating disdain and aversion to all those who are strangers to the Mussulman faith, present an insuperable obstacle to the correction of national prejudices by a familiar intercourse with neighbouring nations.

All those nations who have professed the religion of Mahomet, and whose government and administration of justice, and whose code of law and morality have been formed upon the precepts and maxims of the Koran, have not prospered, but their power has everywhere declined; their resources have diminished, their population has decreased, and while the European nations have been everywhere emerging from a state of bar

corn and wine, and productive of cattle and excellent horses *.

"In the present day," remarks Gibbon," Anatolia still contains some wealthy and populous cities; but, under the Byzantine empire, they were far more flourishing in numbers, size, and opulence." In the decline of that empire, too, only two centuries before the fall of Constantinople, the emperors might assert with dignity and truth, that, of all the monarchs of Christendom, they possessed the greatest city, the most ample revenue, the most flourishing and populous state." In the time of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, forty cities are enumerated in Peloponnesus, one of the themes of the empire, among which we find Sparta, Argos, and Corinth. A sum of five pieces of gold was annually assessed on the different proprietors of land; and, on the proclamation of an Italian war, the Peloponnesians excused themselves by a voluntary oblation of one hundred pounds of gold, (£400,000 sterling,) and a thousand horses, with their arms and trappings.

The manufacture of linen and woollen flourished

* Haiton's Tartar History - Abulpheda Geo. Climat, xvii. 301-305.

+ Constantine de Administrando Imperio, lib. ii. chap. 50, 52.