"According to the levelling system, recommended as the basis of reforms, all classes would eventually be assimilated--the desert Arabs to the laborious Maronites, the intractable Arnoots to the industrious Bulgarians, the thrifty Armenians to the restless and ambitious Greeks, and the humble and parsimonious Jews to the haughty and lavish Osmanlis. Thus, contiguous populations, which now keep each other in check, because their interests are divergent and their jealousies inveterate, would find their interests assimilated; and in the event of opposition to government, the Porte, in lieu of being able to overcome one sect through the rivalry of another, would find them all united against the dominant power. The Ottoman government should therefore avoid establishing any community of rights or interests among the races subjected to its rule. Each of these races ought to be governed according to its own usages and individual creed; there should be uniformity in the principles of administration, but diversity in the application. The Ottoman tenure cannot be maintained but by decided and peremptory superiority. Adhesion on the part of the subjugated is impossible; connexion is all that can be expected; and to preserve this connexion, the supremacy of conquest must not be relaxed. The Porte cannot expect attachment; it must consequently enforce submission. When this absolutism ceases to exist, the power will pass into other hands; and where is the politician that can calculate the results of the transfer? One issue may be safely predicted--England must lose, but cannot gain by the change. With the increasing embarrassments to commerce and industry, which continental states are raising against Britain, it is essential that we should not allow a false cry of philanthropy to throw us off our guard in the Levant. France in Africa, and Russia on the Danube, are intent on the same object. Their battle-cries are civilization and religion; their pretext the improvement of the Christian populations. But who is there that has studied the recent policy of the one, and the undeviating system of the other, since the days of Catherine, that can question for a moment the purport of both? _And yet England and Austria have acted recently as if France were sincere, and Russia disinterested._" [Footnote 28: _Three Years in Constantinople; or, Domestic Manners of the Turks in 1844._ By CHARLES WHITE, ESQ.] [Footnote 29: The root of bezestan and bazar is _bez_, cloth;--of tcharshy, _tchar_, four, meaning a square.] [Footnote 30: A catalogue of works printed from the establishment of the press in 1726 to 1820, is given in the notes to Book 65 of Von Hammer Purgstall's Ottoman History.] [Footnote 31: Mr White erroneously calls him Mourad III., and places the expedition against Bagdad in 1834.]