without the
element on which it thrives, commerce also must largely consist of the
exchange of foreign merchandise for raw home products. The Turk
actually gives ten _occas_ of his raw silk for one _occa_ of
fabricated silk, the material for which is produced on his own soil.

Agriculture is even in a worse state. One often hears the complaint
that the cost of all the necessities of life has increased in
Constantinople fourfold since the annihilation of the Janizaries, as
if heaven had decreed this punishment on those who exterminated the
"soldiers of Islam." The fact, while true, should probably be
explained differently, for, since the events referred to, the great
granaries of the capital, Moldavia, Wallachia, and Egypt, which
formerly had to send half of their harvests to the Bosphorus, have
been closed. In the interior nobody will undertake the growing of
grain on a large scale, because the government makes its purchases
according to prices of its own choosing. The forced purchases by the
government are a greater evil for Turkey than her losses by fire and
the plague combined. They not only undermine prosperity, but they also
cause its springs to dry up. As a result the government must buy its
grain in Odessa, while endless stretches of fertile land, under a most
benignant sky and at only an hour's distance from a city of eight
hundred thousand people, lie untilled.

The outer members of this once powerful political body have died, and
the heart alone has life. A riot in the streets of the capital may be
the funeral procession of the Ottoman Empire. The future will show
whether it is possible for a State to pause in the middle of its fall
and to reorganize itself, or whether fate has decreed that the
Mohammedan-Byzantine Empire shall die, like the Christian-Byzantine
Empire, of its fiscal administration. The peace of Europe, however, is
apparently less menaced by the danger of a foreign conquest of Turkey
than by the extreme weakness of this empire, and its threatened
collapse within itself.

A TRIP TO BRUSSA

TRANSLATED BY EDMUND VON MACH, PH.D.

[This is the fourteenth of the Letters Concerning Conditions and
Events in Turkey. It is dated from Pera, June 16, 1836.]

Yesterday I returned from a short excursion to Asia, which I really
should describe for you in poetry, because I ascended Mount Olympus.
But since I did not reach the summit, and did not climb farther than
the foot, or more properly spe