civilization. They remind the observer vividly of the picture
which history presents to us of the Byzantine Court before the taking of
Constantinople; or, again, of that _material_ retention of Christian
doctrine (to use the theological word), of which Protestantism in its
more orthodox exhibitions, and still more, of which the Greek schism
affords the specimen. Either a state of deadness and mechanical action,
or a restless ebb and flow of opinion and sentiment, is the symptom of
that intellectual exhaustion and decrepitude, whether in politics or
religion, which, if old age be a second childhood, may in some sense be
called barbarism, and of which, at present, we are respectively reminded
in China on the one hand, and in some southern states of Europe on the
other.

These are the principles, whatever modifications they may require,
which, however rudely adumbrated, I trust will suffice to enable me to
contemplate the future of the Ottoman Empire.

FOOTNOTES:

[72] Murray's Asia.

[73] Robertson's America, books vi. and vii.

[74] Univ. Hist. Anc., vol. xvi.

[75] Merivale's Rome, vol. ii.

[76] Guizot's European Civilization.

[77] Gibbon, vol x.

[78] Philosophy of History; Robertson's translation.

LECTURE VIII.

_The Past and Present of the Ottomans._

Whatever objections in detail may stand against the account I have been
giving of barbarism and civilization--and I trust there are none which
do not admit of removal--so far, I think, is clear, that, if my account
be only in the main correct, the Turkish power certainly is not a
civilized, and is a barbarous power. The barbarian lives without
principle and without aim; he does but reflect the successive outward
circumstances in which he finds himself, and he varies with them. He
changes suddenly, when their change is sudden, and is as unlike what he
was just before, as one fortune or external condition is unlike another.
He moves when he is urged by appetite; else, he remains in sloth and
inactivity. He lives, and he dies, and he has done nothing, but leaves
the world as he found it. And what the individual is, such is his whole
generation; and as that generation, such is the generation before and
after. No generation can say what it has been doing; it has not made the
state of things better or worse; for retrogression there is hardly room;
for progress, no sort of material. Now I shall show that these
characteristics of the barbarian are rud