tion of political practicability or expedience:
will the Koran, in its laxest interpretation, admit of that toleration,
on which the Frank kingdoms insist? yet what and where are they without
the Koran?

Nor do we understand the full stress of the dilemma in which they are
placed, until we have considered what is meant by the demands and the
displeasure of the European community. Pledged by the very principle of
their existence to barbarism, the Turks have to cope with civilized
governments all around them, ever advancing in the material and moral
strength which civilization gives, and ever feeling more and more
vividly that the Turks are simply in the way. They are in the way of the
progress of the nineteenth century. They are in the way of the Russians,
who wish to get into the Mediterranean; they are in the way of the
English, who wish to cross to the East; they are in the way of the
French, who, from the Crusades to Napoleon, have felt a romantic
interest in Syria; they are in the way of the Austrians, their
hereditary foes. There they lie, unable to abandon their traditionary
principles, without simply ceasing to be a state; unable to retain them,
and retain the sympathy of Christendom;--Mahometans, despots, slave
merchants, polygamists, holding agriculture in contempt, Europe in
abomination, their own wretched selves in admiration, cut off from the
family of nations,[89] existing by ignorance and fanaticism, and
tolerated in existence by the mutual jealousies of Christian powers as
well as of their own subjects, and by the recurring excitement of
military and political combinations, which cannot last for ever.

5.

And, last of all, as if it were not enough to be unable to procure the
countenance of any Christian power, except on specific conditions
prejudicial to their existence, still further, as the alternative of
their humbling themselves before the haughty nations of the West whom
they abhor, they have to encounter the direct cupidity, hatred, and
overpowering pressure of the multitudinous North, with its fanaticism
almost equal, and its numbers superior, to their own; a peril more awful
in imagination, from the circumstance that its descent has been for so
many centuries foretold and commenced, and of late years so widely
acquiesced in as inevitable. Seven centuries and a half have passed,
since, at the very beginning of the Crusades, a Greek writer still
extant turns from the then menacing inroads of t