hich I have already referred,
consecrates and fortifies their despair.

* * * * *

I have been proving a point, which most persons would grant me, in thus
insisting on the essential barbarism of the Turks; but I have thought it
worth while to insist on it under the feeling, that to prove it is at
the same time to describe it, and many persons will vaguely grant that
they are barbarous without having any clear idea what barbarism means.
With this view I draw out my formal conclusion:--If civilization be the
ascendancy of mind over passion and imagination; if it manifests itself
in consistency of habit and action, and is characterised by a continual
progress or development of the principles on which it rests; and if, on
the other hand, the Turks alternate between sloth and energy,
self-confidence and despair,--if they have two contrary characters
within them, and pass from one to the other rapidly, and when they are
the one, are as if they could not be the other;--if they think
themselves, notwithstanding, to be the first nation upon earth, while at
the end of many centuries they are just what they were at the
beginning;--if they are so ignorant as not to know their ignorance, and
so far from making progress that they have not even started, and so far
from seeking instruction that they think no one fit to teach
them;--there is surely not much hazard in concluding, that, apart from
the consideration of any supernatural intervention, barbarians they have
lived, and barbarians they will die.

FOOTNOTES:

[79] Formby's Visit, p. 70.

[80] Bell's Geography.

[81] Vid, Sir Charles Fellows' Asia Minor.

[82] The correspondent of the _Times_ in February, 1854, speaking of the
great arsenal of Rustchuk, observes: "All the heavy smith work was done
by Bulgarians, the light iron work by gipsies, the carpenters were all
Turks, the sawyers Bulgarians, the tinmen all Jews."

[83] Lib. iv. fin.

[84] Sir C. Fellows.

[85] Bergeron, t. 1.

[86] Edinburgh Rev. 1853.

LECTURE IX.

_The Future of the Ottomans._

Scientific anticipations are commonly either truisms or failures;
failures, if, as is usually the case, they are made upon insufficient
data; and truisms, if they succeed, for conclusions, being always
contained in their premisses, never can be discoveries. Yet, as mixed
mathematics correct, without superseding, the pure science, so I do not
see why I may not allowably take