The dominion¹ of the Ottoman clan², which should have been a mere³ passing phenomenon, like the similar dominion of another Tartar clan in Russia, owes its continuance, as we read its history, to three causes, two of them intellectual. The first is the extraordinary, indeed the absolutely unrivalled force displayed through ages by the descendants of Othman, the Tartar chief from Khorassan. The old line, “An Amurath, an Amurath succeeds,” has been substantially true. Sprung originally from a stock welded into iron by the endless strife⁴ of the great Asiatic desert, mating always with women picked for some separate charm either of beauty or captivation, the sultans, with the rarest exceptions, have been personages, great soldiers, great statesmen, or great tyrants⁵. Mahmoud the destroyer of the Janissaries, who only died in 1839—that is, while men still middle-aged⁶ were alive—was the equal in all but success of Amurath I, who organized, though he did not invent, that terrible institution; and even the present sultan, in many ways so feeble, is no Romulus Augustulus, no connoisseur⁷ in poultry⁸, but a timid Louis XI, who overmatches Russians and Greeks in craft, who terrifies men like his Ottoman Pashas, and who is obeyed with trembling by the most distant servant of his throne. The terrible emir of Afghanistan, whose satraps, while ruling provinces and armies, open his letters “white in the lips with fear,” is not regarded with more slavish awe⁹ than Abdul Hamid, the recluse¹⁰ who watches always in his palace against

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