properly enlightened as to his
intentions. Now that his work has undergone the ordeal of time, one can
appreciate it at its real value. Ascending the throne at an epoch of
anarchy and disorder, having at one and the same time to oppose the
invasion of Russia, and to put down the rebellion of the Pashas, who
were raising their pashalicks into sovereignties, Mahmood gave proofs,
during several years, of a force of character almost inconceivable in a
man enervated from his childhood by the pleasures of the harem.
Unfortunately his intellect was unequal to his obstinacy: every abuse he
put down gave rise to or made way for new abuses, which he could not
foresee, and was unable to destroy. The established order of affairs,
which he fought against, was a hydra, from which, for one head cut off,
twenty sprang up. Far from augmenting his power, his greatest
enterprises merely tended to enfeeble it. The repression of Ali the
Pasha of Janina, cost Mahmood the kingdom of Greece; and had not the
powers of Europe intervened, the war against Mehemet Ali would have cost
him his throne. Even the destruction of the Janissaries, which was
considered so great a cause of triumph by the Sultan, was it in reality
so? It is surely permitted to doubt the circumstance. That powerful
militia, scattered through the empire, was in some sort the focus of
that spirit of fatalism, which had till then been the principal prop of
the imperfect work of the Arabian impostor; to destroy it was to strike
a death-blow to that society which breathed as it were in war alone. In
overthrowing an obstacle which paralysed his power, Mahmood dug an abyss
into which the Turkish empire must sooner or later fall; for the spirit
of religious enthusiasm which he destroyed has been replaced by no other
incentive.

The chief fault of Mahmood was the cutting down without thinking of
sowing; for without properly understanding the extent of what he was
doing, he too hastily cast from its old course, without placing it in a
better, a dull stupid nation, to transform which required both time and
patience. Above all, Mahmood was guided solely by the impulses of an
indomitable pride, and seems to have much less considered the interests
of his empire, than the satisfying of his own vanity. He hastened to
change the aspect and surface of things, deluding himself into the idea
that he had metamorphosed an Asiatic people into a European state.
Hurried away by the desire of innovati