(2.) Still less can the possibility be admitted of a civilized polity really relapsing into barbarism; though a state of things may be superinduced, which in many of its features may be thought to resemble it. In truth, I have not yet traced out the ultimate result of those internal revolutions which I have assigned as the incidental but certain evils, in the long run, attendant on civilization. That result is various: sometimes the over-civilized and degenerate people is swept from the face of the earth, as the Roman populations in Africa by the Vandals; sometimes it is reduced to servitude, as the Egyptians by the Ptolemies, or the Greeks by the Turks; sometimes it is absorbed or included in new political combinations, as the northern Italians by the Lombards and Franks; sometimes it remains unmolested on its own territory, and lives by the momentum, or the repute, or the habit, or the tradition of its former civilization. This last of course is the only case which bears upon the question I am considering; and I grant that a state of things does then ensue, which in some of its phenomena is like barbarism; China is an example in point. No one can deny its civilization; its diligent care of the soil, its cultivation of silk and of the tea-tree, its populousness, its canals, its literature, its court ceremonial, its refinement of manners, its power of persevering so loyally in its old institutions through so many ages, abundantly vindicate it from the reproach of barbarism. But at the same time there are tokens of degeneracy, which are all the stronger for being also tokens, still more striking than those I have hitherto mentioned, of its high civilization in times past. It has had for ages the knowledge of the more recent discoveries and institutions of the West, which have done so much for Europe, yet it has been unable to use them, the magnetic needle, gunpowder, and printing. The littleness of the national character, its self-conceit, and its formality, are further instances of an effete civilization. They remind the observer vividly of the picture which history presents to us of the Byzantine Court before the taking of Constantinople; or, again, of that _material_ retention of Christian doctrine (to use the theological word), of which Protestantism in its more orthodox exhibitions, and still more, of which the Greek schism affords the specimen. Either a state of deadness and mechanical action, or a restless ebb and flow of opinion and sentiment, is the symptom of that intellectual exhaustion and decrepitude, whether in politics or religion, which, if old age be a second childhood, may in some sense be called barbarism, and of which, at present, we are respectively reminded in China on the one hand, and in some southern states of Europe on the other. These are the principles, whatever modifications they may require, which, however rudely adumbrated, I trust will suffice to enable me to contemplate the future of the Ottoman Empire.