It is far from my purpose to excuse the Osmanlis from any of the crimes they have perpetrated against civilization. But the foregoing paragraphs evince that their part in the destruction of the proud cities and monuments--magnificent centers of culture and commerce--of the ancient world has been greatly exaggerated. Their great sin against humanity, at least for generations past, has been one of omission rather than commission.[226] It has consisted--I speak of the ruling classes--in their inefficient government, which has given little or no encouragement to trade or industry; which has neglected roads and bridges, making interior communication difficult and often impossible; which has failed to develop the vast resources of a country to which a beneficent nature has been rarely prodigal; which has oppressed and trodden down a laborious and long-suffering peasantry, than which there is no better in the world; which has failed to provide for the education of the masses, ever eager for knowledge and improvement; which has permitted systematic bribery in high places and allowed crying malfeasance in office to go unpunished; which, by its unexampled apathy, has been responsible for one of the richest countries in the world degenerating into one of the most desolate, and for a great mass of its people--although innocent--becoming the most execrated. Surely this indictment is damning enough without cumbering it with counts which are irrelevant or of which the Sultan’s government is not guilty. But, fortunately for those who are able to read the signs of the times, there are well-grounded hopes for a change for the better--for a return to the position among nations which the Ottoman Empire occupied when its schools and scholars were as famed as were its achievements on land and sea--when the followers of Osman shall be as far in the van of civilization as they are now in the rear. CHAPTER X ISLAM, PAST AND PRESENT Properly to appreciate Mohammed we must discard our religious and national prejudices and see in his work only what he has put in it, independently of the consequences which this work has entailed and which may more or less wound us even to-day. J. BARTHÉLEMY ST. HILAIRÉ.[227]