arch may send from his harem to the
vizier's palace a negro "mute," armed with the bowstring. And when that
black mute arrives, the vizier, doffing his robe of office, and with
neither question nor remonstrance, will bare his neck to be strangled.
That is real despotism--the despotism that the East has known.

Such is the political tradition of the Orient. And it is surely obvious
that under such a tradition neither ordered government nor consistent
progress is possible. Eastern history is, in fact, largely a record of
sudden flowerings and equally sudden declines. A strong, able man cuts
his way to power in a period of confusion and decay. He must be strong
and able, or he would not win over other men of similar nature
struggling for the coveted prize. His energy and ability soon work
wonders. He knows the rough-and-ready way of getting things done. His
vigour and resolution supply the driving-power required to compel his
subordinates to act with reasonable efficiency, especially since
incompetence or dishonesty are punished with the terrible severity of
the Persian king who flayed an unjust satrap alive and made the skin
into the seat of the official chair on which the new satrap sat to
administer justice.

While the master lives, things may go well. But the master dies, and is
succeeded by his son. This son, even assuming that he has inherited much
of his father's ability, has had the worst possible upbringing. Raised
in the harem, surrounded by obsequious slaves and designing women,
neither his pride nor his passions have been effectively restrained, and
he grows up a pompous tyrant and probably precociously depraved. Such a
man will not be apt to look after things as his father did. And as soon
as the master's eye shifts, things begin to go to pieces. How can it be
otherwise? His father built up no governmental machine, functioning
almost automatically, as in the West. His officers worked from fear or
personal loyalty; not out of a patriotic sense of duty or impersonal
_esprit de corps_. Under the grandson, matters get even worse, power
slips from his incompetent hands and is parcelled out among many local
despots, of whom the strongest cuts his way to power, assuming that the
decadent state is not overrun by some foreign conqueror. In either
eventuality, the old cycle--David, Solomon, Rehoboam--is finished, and a
new cycle begins--with the same destined end.

That, in a nutshell, is the political history of the