Among the "blessings" of the system is the fact that local places of exchange no longer exist. The storekeeper who pays rent and taxes has found himself unable to compete with the pedler who pays neither; and the consequence is that the poor cultivator finds it impossible to exchange his products, small as they are, for the commodities he needs, except, on the occasional arrival of a caravan, and that has generally proved far more likely to absorb the little money in circulation, than any of the more bulky and less valuable products of the earth. As usual in purely agricultural countries, the whole body of cultivators is hopelessly in debt, and the money-lender fleeces all. If he aids the peasant before harvest, he must have an enormous interest, and be paid in produce at a large discount from the market price; The village communities are almost universally in debt, but to them, as the security is good, the banker charges _only_ twenty per cent. per annum. Turkey is the very paradise of middlemen--a consequence of the absence of any mode of employment except in cultivation or in trade; and the moral effect of this may be seen in the following passage:-- "If you see," says Urquhart, "a Turk meditating in a corner, it is on some speculation--the purchase of a revenue farm, or the propriety of a loan at sixty per cent.; if you see pen or paper in his hand, it is making or checking an account; if there is a disturbance in the street, it is a disputed barter; whether in the streets or in-doors, whether in a coffeehouse, a serai, or a bazaar, whatever the rank, nation, language of the persons around you, traffic, barter, gain are the prevailing impulses; grusch, para, florin, lira, asper, amid the Babel of tongues, are the universally intelligible sounds."--P. 138. We have thus a whole people divided into two classes--the plunderers and the plundered; and the cause of this may be found in the fact that the owners and occupants of land have never been permitted to strengthen themselves by the formation of that natural alliance between the plough and the loom, the hammer and the harrow, so much admired by Adam Smith. The government is as weak as the people, for it is so entirely dependent on the bankers, that they may be regarded as the real owners of the land and the people, taxing them at discretion; and to them certainly enure all the profits of cultivation. As a consequence of this, the land is almost valueless. A recent traveller states that good land maybe purchased in the immediate vicinity of Smyrna at six cents an acre, and at a little distance vast quantities may be had for nothing. Throughout the world, the freedom of man has grown in the ratio of the increase in the value of land, and that has always grown in the ratio of the tendency to have the artisan take his place by the side of the cultivator of the earth. Whatever tends to prevent this natural association tends, therefore, to the debasement and enslavement of man.