gners is no longer founded on their courage and power.

Near the coasts of the Archipelago European intercourse has, in some
degree, civilised the manners of the Turks, but as the traveller
advances into the interior, civilisation sensibly decreases. On
approaching the central plateau of Asia Minor, he perceives that
cultivation seldom extends beyond the distance of half a league round
a village; the inhabitants are secreted in the mountains, and carefully
avoid the vicinity of the great roads; it is a well-known statistical
phenomenon, that the most inaccessible districts are the most populous
and the richest. This will be easily understood, when it is told that
the passage of troops through a district is a pest more dreaded than
the fatal plague itself. The once flourishing and magnificent plains of
Eske-Seher have been deserts since the Sultan Amurath traversed them, at
the head of 300,000 men, to lay siege to Bagdad. His passage was marked
by all the devastating effects of the hurricane. When a body of those
horsemen called Delhis, who are attached to the suite of every Pasha,
enters a village, the consternation is general, and followed by a system
of exaction that to the unfortunate villager is equivalent to ruin. To
complain to the Pasha would be to court instant destruction.

From this we can conceive the horror of the peasantry of Anatolia at
the passage of large bodies of troops through their country, and
consequently the obstacles a European army would encounter which should
ever be masters of the Black and Mediterranean Seas. The Turcomans,
a Nornase tribe, who sometimes pitch their tents on the shores of the
Archipelago, and who pay but a moderate tribute to the Porte, are also
another cause of devastation. But it is the Musseleins, the farmers
of the Pasha, who are the oppressors _par excellence_; they are always
present to despoil the unfortunate fellah, to leave him, to use a common
expression in the mouths of this oppressed race, 'but eyes wherewith to
weep.' The welfare of the people, respect for the orders of the Porte,
are things to them of the utmost indifference; to govern is to raise
men and taxes; to obey, is to fear. Thus the law of force reigns almost
exclusively at forty or fifty leagues from the capital.

But on a nearer approach to the Euphrates, the dissolution of every
social tie becomes more striking. We find ourselves amid the independent
tribes--the cruel Lendes; among the Tezdis--a peo