A deal of the mental acumen which with us is directed towards business and the accumulation of wealth is devoted in the case of the Turks to other and higher objects. While wealth and worldly position are our aims, and failure to achieve either spells life bankruptcy, the Turk appreciates conduct and good deeds as expounded in the Koran above everything else. According to Guglielmo Ferrero, “the Moslem can never pardon the unlimited materialism of Europeans.” Right conduct in all the situations of life is impressed upon him by the law of Mohammed, and in this respect the Moslem is more removed from European thought than in any other, inasmuch as there is a harmony between his precepts and his practice. He sees the stranger bowing down to rank and worldly position, whereas with him class distinctions are scarcely more than official. In Turkey, outside a comparatively few wealthy families—many of which are Phanariote Greek Christians who have supplied high official servants for generations to the Turkish State, and hold themselves somewhat aloof from the Mohammedans—there is little superiority of caste or the arrogance of class consciousness. The current standards are, in conformity with the teaching of the Koran and the New Testament, humanely democratic. Ahmed Midhat was at one time talked of as a possible Grand Vizier, for the Sultan was convinced of his integrity as well as of his ability. The fact that his father was a seller of cloth, or that he himself began life as an apprentice, was so far from constituting any disadvantage that neither he nor his friends would have been able to understand the idea of his humble parentage being in any way derogatory. All the less so since he was a man of magnificent presence, one of the comparatively few in Constantinople who by their appearance recalled the Sultans of the zenith of Ottoman power, who were fathers at sixteen and still added to their family at the age of seventy. So little does obscurity of birth constitute a stigma that a Turk, after having once been a servant who took charge of the goloshes of visitors left outside on entering a Turkish private house, became a pasha and was given the name of Papoudji (or slipper) Pasha; this cognomen was accepted by him and his friends rather as a compliment than otherwise. A Turk would be despised who was ashamed of, or endeavoured to hide, his humble antecedents, or denied his poor relations. He has no understanding of those who, having got on in the world, neglect or cut themselves adrift from their connexions because these have become irksome and they are ashamed of them. When a man rises to high position in Turkey he remembers only too readily those who belong to him, and now and then gets himself into trouble by helping his poor relations or those who have been friends of his obscure youth; and this often without any other motive than the satisfaction to be derived from a kind action.