overthrow the possessor of supreme power, with the self-same violence by means of which he had raised himself to it, would appear at once as allowable and attractive. Thence would follow more frequent change of dynasty, indifference to it on the part of the population, continual suspicion, and tyrannical exercise of even the bloodiest means to put down every opposing force. Thus the government of the Ottoman kingdom did not take that character of brutal tyranny which marks the history of Persia. The Persian king is so absolutely lord of the life and property of his subjects, that a sentence even issued in a drunken revel without the least formality receives immediate execution. A Persian proverb truly says: To be near the shah is to be near a burning fire. The general view that a king is naturally tyrannical and unjust has passed into the very language, so that a complainant for the strongest expression of the wrong which he has suffered says: He played the king over me. Thus the learned in the law maintain that the king’s commands are superior to the right of nature, they only yield to a positive divine command. The lordship of the Ottoman sultans, though resting on the same principle of unlimited power, appears on the whole milder and more moderate. Here too, as the founder of the line declared, all property belongs to the sultan; here also “the slave’s neck is thinner than a hair,” and all subjects rank as the sultan’s slaves, and even call themselves so: here too the sultan’s mother calls her son “my lion” or “my tiger,” and Moslim name the sultan not only “the Shadow of God,” or “the Refuge of the World,” but also “the Executioner, the Slayer,” since he alone possesses the absolute right over the life of all. Turkish doctors ascribe to him also a holy character not to be effaced by any immorality. If his actions shew a scorn of all admitted conceptions of justice or prudence, yet in force of a Mohammedan fiction it is assumed that he does much or most of this in consequence of a divine suggestion, and therefore that his motives can neither be discerned nor judged by men. In the same spirit the learned in the law maintain that the sultan can put to death every day fourteen persons, without giving reason, or lying under imputation of tyranny. Whoever receives death without resistance from his hand or by his order becomes thereby a martyr, and many of his servants are said to have striven after the honour of such a death as a secure pledge of eternal happiness. A tyrannical power such as this as a rule naturally strikes those only who stand near the throne. The members of his own family, the higher officers of state, fall victims to it. The mass of the people seldom feels such direct effects of their despot. Here the principle holds, the higher the dignity, the more perfect the confidence, the greater the danger. The grand visiers, the other selves of the sultans in temporal matters have experienced this. A hundred