himself, and by them assureth his State; for they, in their Child-hood, taken from their Parents Laps, and delivered in Charge to one or other appointed for that purpose, quickly, and before they are aware, become Mahometans; and so no more acknowledging Father or Mother, depend wholly on the Great Sultan; who, to make use of them, both feeds them and fosters them, at whose hands onely they look for all things, and whom alone they thank for all. Of which Fry, so taken from their Christian Parents (the only Seminary of his Wars) some become Horse-men, some Foot-men, and so in time the greatest Commanders of his State and Empire, next unto himself; the natural Turks, in the mean time, giving themselves wholly unto the Trade of Merchandise, and other their Mechanical Occupations; or else to the feeding of Cattel, their most ancient and natural Vocation, not intermedling at all with matters of Government or State.”[77] CHAPTER II THE OTTOMAN RULING INSTITUTION: AS A SLAVE-FAMILY I. GENERAL DESCRIPTION Perhaps no more daring experiment has been tried on a large scale upon the face of the earth than that embodied in the Ottoman Ruling Institution. Its nearest ideal analogue is found in the Republic of Plato, its nearest actual parallel in the Mameluke system of Egypt; but it was not restrained within the aristocratic Hellenic limitations of the first, and it subdued and outlived the second. In the United States of America men have risen from the rude work of the backwoods to the presidential chair, but they have done so by their own effort and not through the gradations of a system carefully organized to push them forward. The Roman Catholic church can still train a peasant to become a pope, but it has never begun by choosing its candidates almost exclusively from families which profess a hostile religion. The Ottoman system deliberately took slaves and made them ministers of state; it took boys from the sheep-run and the plow-tail and made them courtiers and the husbands of princesses; it took young men whose ancestors had borne the Christian name for centuries, and made them rulers in the greatest of Mohammedan states, and soldiers and generals in invincible armies whose chief joy was to beat down the Cross and elevate the Crescent. It never asked its novices, “Who was your father?” or “What do you know?” or even “Can you speak our tongue?”; but it studied their faces and their frames and said, “_You_ shall be a soldier, and if you show yourself worthy, a general,” or, “_You_ shall be a scholar and a gentleman, and if the ability lies in you, a governor and a prime minister.” Grandly disregarding that fabric of fundamental customs which is called “human nature,” and those religious and social prejudices which are thought to be almost as deep as life itself, the Ottoman system took children forever from parents, discouraged family cares among its members through their most active years, allowed them no certain hold on property, gave