Since the commencement of the decline of the Turkish power, the Ottoman court has made it an invariable policy to infringe little by little on the privileges allowed to foreign nations by treaty; and to conduct, by systematic stratagem, an administration which has been constantly falling in vigour and energy. If any infraction is left unnoticed by the party it concerns, and the article of a treaty, in its modified state, is once applied with success to any case to which it may relate, it becomes a precedent which the Porte will obstinately refer to at any other time that the strict interpretation of the article is insisted upon. Thus, without assigning any satisfactory reason, and without repealing, in a plausible manner, the Wallachian law of election, the Sultan took to himself the exclusive right of appointing to the two Voïvodates. The measure was not opposed, and its repetition became habitual; and if, at the present moment, the inhabitants of the two Principalities were to recall their right to memory, and claim the enforcement of it, the Porte would consider and treat the proceeding as open rebellion on their part. No prince of Wallachian or Moldavian birth or origin, was ever appointed after the recall of Bessarabba, and the Porte would have been willing to govern the principalities through the means of Turkish Pashahs; but the intrigues of the state-interpreter, Alexander Marrocordato, who was then endeavouring to secure either of the Voïvodates to his son Nicholas, induced at the time the Ottoman government to introduce another system, which subsequent motives have contributed to support to the present day. The Porte selected the new princes from the Greeks of Constantinople, whose long habit of obedience and servile degradation, appeared to render them suitable tools for the new policy adopted, relative to the government of the principalities. From that moment the princes have been appointed by _Beratt_, an imperial diploma, in which the Sultan, in proclaiming the nominations, commands the Wallachian and Moldavian nations to acknowledge and obey the bearers of it, as sole depositories of the sovereign authority.[17] They were instructed to pursue the plan, of administration of the Voïvodes, and thus they were suffered to hold a court, to confer dignities and titles of nobility, and to keep up a show of sovereign splendour, circumstances which were most flattering to the vanity of the Greeks, and proved useful to the interested views of the Porte. But they were most strictly forbidden to maintain troops, or to collect any, under any pretence whatever. This precaution was indispensable, as it prevented the princes from acquiring military power, and the natives from aspiring to independency.