The baseness and incorrigible ignobility of the Oriental mind is seen in the radical inability to appreciate justice when brought into collision with the royal privileges of rulers that represent the nation. Not only, for example, do Turks, etc., think it an essential function of royalty to cut off heads, but they think it essential to the consummation of this function that the sacrifice should rest upon caprice known and avowed. To suppose it wicked as a mere process of executing the laws would rob it of all its grandeur. It would stand for nothing. Nay, even if the power were conceded, and the sovereign should abstain from using it of his own free will and choice, this would not satisfy the wretched Turk. Blood, lawless blood--a horrid Moloch, surmounting a grim company of torturers and executioners, and on the other side revelling in a thousand unconsenting women--this hideous image of brutal power and unvarnished lust is clearly indispensable to the Turk as incarnating the representative grandeur of his nation. With this ideal ever present to the Asiatic and Mohammedan mind, no wonder that even their religion needs the aid of the sword and bloodshed to secure conversion. In the _Spectator_ is mentioned, as an Eastern apologue, that a vizier who (like Chaucer's Canace) had learned the language of birds used it with political effect to his sovereign. The sultan had demanded to know what a certain reverend owl was speechifying about to another owl distantly related to him. The vizier listened, and reported that the liberal old owl was making a settlement upon his daughter, in case his friend's son should marry her, of a dozen ruined villages. Loyally long life to our noble sultan! I shall, my dear friend, always have a ruined village at your service against a rainy day, so long as our present ruler reigns and desolates. _Obliviscor jam injurias tuas, Clodia._--This is about the most barefaced use of the rhetorical trick--viz., to affect _not_ to do, to pass over whilst actually doing all the while--that anywhere I have met with.--'Pro Caelio,' p. 234 [p. 35, Volgraff's edition]. _Evaserint_ and _comprehenderint._--Suppose they had rushed out, and suppose they had seized Licinus. So I read--not _issent._--_Ibid., p. 236_ [_Ibid., p. 44_]. _Velim vel potius quid nolim dicere._--Aristotle's case of throwing overboard your own property. He _vult dicere_, else he could not mean, yet _nonvult_, for he is shocked at saying such things of Clodia.--_Ibid., p. 242_ [_Ibid., p. 49_]. 2.--MORAL AND PRACTICAL.