I have not time for more than an allusion to what is the complement of this arrogance, and is a most pregnant subject of thought, whenever the fortunes of the Ottomans are contemplated; I mean the despair which takes its place in their minds, consistently with the barbarian temperament, upon the occurrence of any considerable reverses. A passage from Mr. Thornton just now quoted refers to this characteristic. The overthrow at Lepanto, though they rallied from their consternation for a while, was a far more serious and permanent misfortune in its moral than in its material consequences. And, on any such national calamity, the fatalism of their creed, to which I have already referred, consecrates and fortifies their despair. * * * * * I have been proving a point, which most persons would grant me, in thus insisting on the essential barbarism of the Turks; but I have thought it worth while to insist on it under the feeling, that to prove it is at the same time to describe it, and many persons will vaguely grant that they are barbarous without having any clear idea what barbarism means. With this view I draw out my formal conclusion:--If civilization be the ascendancy of mind over passion and imagination; if it manifests itself in consistency of habit and action, and is characterised by a continual progress or development of the principles on which it rests; and if, on the other hand, the Turks alternate between sloth and energy, self-confidence and despair,--if they have two contrary characters within them, and pass from one to the other rapidly, and when they are the one, are as if they could not be the other;--if they think themselves, notwithstanding, to be the first nation upon earth, while at the end of many centuries they are just what they were at the beginning;--if they are so ignorant as not to know their ignorance, and so far from making progress that they have not even started, and so far from seeking instruction that they think no one fit to teach them;--there is surely not much hazard in concluding, that, apart from the consideration of any supernatural intervention, barbarians they have lived, and barbarians they will die. FOOTNOTES: [79] Formby's Visit, p. 70. [80] Bell's Geography. [81] Vid, Sir Charles Fellows' Asia Minor. [82] The correspondent of the _Times_ in February, 1854, speaking of the great arsenal of Rustchuk, observes: "All the heavy smith work was done by Bulgarians, the light iron work by gipsies, the carpenters were all Turks, the sawyers Bulgarians, the tinmen all Jews." [83] Lib. iv. fin. [84] Sir C. Fellows. [85] Bergeron, t. 1. [86] Edinburgh Rev. 1853. LECTURE IX. _The Future of the Ottomans._