Persia are, and always have been, swayed by a clever band of
flatterers acting through their nominal master; while India, under the
kindly British rule, is a perfect instance of a ruthless military
despotism, where neither blood nor stratagem have been spared in
exacting the uttermost farthing from the miserable serfs--they are
nothing else--and in robbing and defrauding the rich of their just and
lawful possessions. All these countries teem with stories of adventurers
risen from the ranks to the command of armies, of itinerant merchants
wedded to princesses, of hardy sailors promoted to admiralties, of
half-educated younger sons of English peers dying in the undisputed
possession of ill-gotten millions. With the strong personal despotism of
the First Napoleon began a new era of adventurers in France; not of
elegant and accomplished adventurers like M. de St. Germain, Cagliostro,
or the Comtesse de la Motte, but regular rag-tag-and-bobtail cut-throat
moss-troopers, who carved and slashed themselves into notice by sheer
animal strength and brutality.

There is infinitely more grace and romance about the Eastern adventurer.
There is very little slashing and hewing to be done there, and what
there is, is managed as quietly as possible. When a Sultan must be rid
of the last superfluous wife, she is quietly done up in a parcel with a
few shot, and dropped into the Bosphorus without more ado. The good
old-fashioned Rajah of Mudpoor did his killing without scandal, and when
the kindly British wish to keep a secret, the man is hanged in a quiet
place where there are no reporters. As in the Greek tragedies, the
butchery is done behind the scenes, and there is no glory connected with
the business, only gain. The ghosts of the slain sometimes appear in the
columns of the recalcitrant Indian newspapers and gibber a feeble little
"Otototoi!" after the manner of the shade of Dareios, but there is very
little heed paid to such visitations by the kindly British. But though
the "raw head and bloody bones" type of adventurer is little in demand
in the East, there is plenty of scope for the intelligent and wary
flatterer, and some room for the honest man of superior gifts, who is
sufficiently free from Oriental prejudice to do energetically the thing
which comes in his way, distancing all competitors for the favours of
fortune by sheer industry and unerring foresight.

I once knew a man in the East who was neither a flatterer nor
freeboo