the broad earth is there another picture half so beautiful!
As we turned and moved again through the temple, I wished that the
illustrious men who had sat in it in the remote ages could visit it
again and reveal themselves to our curious eyes—Plato, Aristotle,
Demosthenes, Socrates, Phocion, Pythagoras, Euclid, Pindar, Xenophon,
Herodotus, Praxiteles and Phidias, Zeuxis the painter. What a
constellation of celebrated names! But more than all, I wished that old
Diogenes, groping so patiently with his lantern, searching so zealously
for one solitary honest man in all the world, might meander along and
stumble on our party. I ought not to say it, maybe, but still I suppose
he would have put out his light.
CONSTANTINOPLE
Commercial morals, especially, are bad. There is no gainsaying that.
Greek, Turkish, and Armenian morals consist only in attending church
regularly on the appointed Sabbaths, and in breaking the ten
commandments all the balance of the week. It comes natural to them to
lie and cheat in the first place, and then they go on and improve on
nature until they arrive at perfection. In recommending his son to a
merchant as a valuable salesman, a father does not say he is a nice,
moral, upright boy, and goes to Sunday-school and is honest, but he
says, “This boy is worth his weight in broad pieces of a hundred—for
behold, he will cheat whomsoever hath dealings with him, and from the
Euxine to the waters of Marmora there abideth not so gifted a liar!” How
is that for a recommendation? The missionaries tell me that they hear
encomiums like that passed upon people every day. They say of a person
they admire, “Ah, he is a charming swindler, and a most exquisite liar!”
TURKISH JOURNALISM
The newspaper business has its inconveniences in Constantinople. Two
Greek papers and one French one were suppressed here within a few days
of each other. No victories of the Cretans are allowed to be printed.
From time to time the Grand Vizier sends a notice to the various editors
that the Cretan insurrection is entirely suppressed, and although that
editor knows better, he still has to print the notice. The Levant Herald
is too fond of speaking praisefully of Americans to be popular with the
Sultan, who does not relish our sympathy with the Cretans, and therefore
that paper has to be particularly circumspect in order to keep out of
trouble. Once the editor, forgetting the official notice in his paper
that the Cretans were crushed out, printed a letter of a very different
tenor, from the American Consul in Crete, and was fined two hundred and
fifty dollars for it. Shortly he printed another from the same source
and was imprisoned three months for his pains. I think I could get the
assistant editorship of the Levant Herald, but I am going to try to
worry along without it.
THE CAMEL
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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