and strengthened by the habit of ruling, accustomed to being assured in the name of God that they belong to a race of conquerors, born to fight, but not to work, and wont to subsist off the labors of the vanquished, they cannot so much as take in the idea that the people subdued by their arms could ever lay claim to the right of civil equality with themselves. Possessed as they are by a blind faith in the visible overrulings of Providence, their conquest of Europe was but a fulfilment of the will of God, and it is God who invested them, as a mark of His power, with this earthly sovereignty. The fact of His continuing to maintain them in it in the face of so many hostile forces is an incontestable proof of their divine right and of the truth of their religion. Against this line of argument the claims of civilization for human rights and equality are urged in vain. For them civilization means nothing but a hostile force which is trying to disarm them without coming to an open fight: little by little, and stealthily, it would lower them in the estimation of their own subjects and steal away their ascendency. So, in addition to despising it as a vain thing, they fear it as an enemy, and, unable to oppose it by force, they offer the resistance of their own invincible inertia. To be transformed, civilized, is to put themselves on an equality with the people they have conquered, to endeavor to emulate them in intellectual achievements, study, work, acquire a new superiority, win again, this time with the mind, the victory already gained by their swords. To such an enterprise as this is opposed, apart from their natural interests as rulers, their religious contempt for unbelievers, their military pride, their indolence, which is second nature, and the character of their intellect, entirely wanting as it is in the creative faculty and dulled and blunted by the continued iteration of those same few ideas which form the entire intellectual patrimony of their nation. Moreover, those among themselves who have adopted what they are pleased to call European civilization, and represent the state to which they believe Europe would like to see all the sons of Osman brought,--those of their brethren who wear long coats and gloves and chatter French and neglect the mosque, hardly set such an example as might reasonably be expected to convert the others. In what way has the so-called civilization affected them? On this point at least there is little difference of opinion: the new Turk is not worth as much as the old; he has adopted our dress, our conveniences, our vices, and our vanity, but thus far neither our beliefs nor our ideas, and has succeeded, moreover, in the course of this partial transformation, in losing whatever good points he may once have possessed in the depths of his genuine Ottoman nature. Thus far, the only fruits of civilization evident to the conservative Turk is a more widely diffused _peste dicasterica_, an innumerable