state would have supplied
from its own resources; and it fell perhaps without any essential
prejudice to the integrity of the power which it had served. That power
is just what it was before the Janizaries were formed. They may still
fall back upon the powerful cavalry, which carried them all the way from
Turkistan; or they may proceed to employ a mercenary force; anyhow their
primitive social type remains inviolate.

Such is the strange phenomenon, or rather portent, presented to us by
the barbarian power which has been for centuries seated in the very
heart of the old world; which has in its brute clutch the most famous
countries of classical and religious antiquity, and many of the most
fruitful and beautiful regions of the earth; which stretches along the
course of the Danube, the Euphrates, and the Nile; which embraces the
Pindus, the Taurus, the Caucasus, Mount Sinai, the Libyan mountains, and
the Atlas, as far as the Pillars of Hercules; and which, having no
history itself, is heir to the historical names of Constantinople and
Nicaea, Nicomedia and Caesarea, Jerusalem and Damascus, Nineveh and
Babylon, Mecca and Bagdad, Antioch and Alexandria, ignorantly holding in
possession one-half of the history of the whole world. There it lies and
will not die, and has not in itself the elements of death, for it has
the life of a stone, and, unless pounded and pulverized, is
indestructible. Such is it in the simplicity of its national existence,
while that mode of existence remains, while it remains faithful to its
religion and its imperial line. Should its fidelity to either fail, it
would not merely degenerate or decay; it would simply cease to be.

4.

But we have dwelt long enough on the internal peculiarities of the
Ottomans; now let us shift the scene, and view them in the presence of
their enemies, and in their external relations both above and below
them; and then at once a very different prospect presents itself for our
contemplation. However, the first remark I have to make is one which has
reference still to their internal condition, but which does not properly
come into consideration, till we place them in the presence of rival
and hostile nations and races. Moral degeneracy is not, strictly
speaking, a cause of political ruin, as I have already said; but its
existence is of course a point of the gravest importance, when we would
calculate the chance which a people has of standing the brunt of war and
insu