It seems strange that Republicanism should never have commended itself to the minds of Orientals. Some of the conditions to which they have been subjected, and some of their ideas ought, one might have thought, to have engendered the wish to give a trial to this form of polity. Socially, ideas of aristocratic exclusiveness have little weight with them, and, politically, none at all. The expression of ‘taking a man from the dung-hill and setting him among princes’ is old, and represents an old practice; and it is a proceeding with which they are to this day in their government, and the hierarchy of office, quite familiar. This ultra-democratic idea of the equal fitness, even for the highest places, of men taken from any class in society, offends none of their sentiments, or instincts. They would not be shocked at seeing one who had begun life as a donkey-boy, or a barber, so long as he was an Arab, or Osmanlee, and a true believer, raised to be a Pasha. Then, too, no people in the world have suffered so much, and so long, from their respective governments as the Orientals have from their despotic monarchies, administered by a descending series of hardly responsible governors. And as to general manners and ideas, there is probably a greater amount of uniformity in the East among all classes, than is to be found elsewhere. One might have supposed that all this, at one time or another, sooner or later, would have disposed them to take refuge in Republicanism. We have, however, no instance of the idea having been entertained. It seems as if they had no capacity for apprehending it, for the account Herodotus gives us of the proposal to democratize the Government of Persia is a transparent Greek fable. At all events, taking the story as we have it, the mover was unable to find a seconder for his proposal. This phenomenon in their history surprises us: it is, however, their history which enables us to understand it, and to understand it completely. They never possessed a legislature. This, which every little Greek city possessed, which was the very soul of Greek political life, and has ever been, more or less, a necessity of European political life, never could have been known in the East. There the idea never had any place in men’s minds; or, if it had, was aborted in the embryo stage, and never saw the light. In short, with them a legislature was an impossibility; for, as their laws have always been a revelation from God, any attempt to legislate would have been nothing less than a direct and formal denial, and renunciation of their religion.