ons of the past, and
introduces new scenes of life; it reforms without injuring, and leaves
us undecided as to the value of the progress made. New customs and new
habits leave man where he was; his nature is still the same, and perhaps
he has only engrafted on a faulty structure what neither embellishes nor
improves, and shows how slow is the progress of the human mind toward
this goal for which it has, since the commencement of time, been bent.

This is peculiarly verified in the 'Orient,' the most ancient of climes
and lands. Through the mist of so many centuries, so many thousands of
years, the 'far East' has followed the 'even tenor of its way' through
revolutions and systems; its usages have been consecrated by time, and
the parent has handed down to his son the usages which were more nearly
allied to the natural state of man than those of the more famed and
progressing 'West.' The animal has had more sway than the intellectual
part of his nature, and what the curious traveler most admires is the
still primitive condition of the latter. Violence there reigns superior
to reason, and if changes be made, the former consults but little the
latter in the measures which it adopts for the prosecution of its plans.
There is seldom any appeal made by the reformer to the understandings of
the people to be reformed; they must blindly adopt the innovations
offered, and this without the means of contrasting what they are thus
compelled to receive at the hand of the bestower with what they forsake.
Tossed in the billows of doubt, they are exposed to the rocks of
misconception, and are too often wrecked through the total absence of
any chart to guide them in their new voyage of life. The transitory step
is always a dangerous one to a people who have not entire confidence in
their leader, for his plans may inspire neither conviction nor approval,
and if they fail, leave his followers exposed to all the fury of storms
without any haven in which to seek a refuge.

Sultan Mahmoud, believing that European civilization was superior to
that of the East, imagined that he adopted it, when he only assumed its
exterior, the costume of Frankistan. How little did he know of the
defects to which this simplest part of it led. Luckily, he adopted only
the habiliments of the male sex, leaving those of the female unchanged.
The flowing robes, full of ease and comfort; the turban, soft to the
head, and giving it protection from the colds of winter