The second cause of the continuance of the Ottoman dominion¹ has been less accidental. Like the early caliphs, and indeed all able Mussulman dynasties except the Persian, the ruling house of Turkey has for all these centuries maintained unbroken the principle that, apart from creed², ability is the only qualification for the highest service. Outside the navy, a Turkish grandee³ must be a Mussulman; but that granted, there is no obstacle of birth, or cultivation⁴, or position standing⁵ in any man’s path. Even slavery is no barrier. Over and over again, a sultan apparently⁶ at the end of his resources has stooped among the crowd, clutched a soldier, a slipper-bearer, a tobacconist, a renegade, given him his own limitless power, and asking of him nothing but success, has secured it in full measure. Equality within the faith, which is a dogma of Islam, and next to its belief in a “sultan of the sky,” its grand attraction to inferior races, has in Turkey been a reality as it has been in no other empire on earth, and has provided its sovereigns—who, be it remembered, fear no rival unless he be a kinsman⁷, an Arab, or a “prophet”—with an endless supply of the kind of ability they need. The history of the grand viziers of Turkey, were it ever written, would be the history of men who have risen by sheer force of ability—that is, by success in war or by statesmanship, or, in fewer instances, by that art of mastering an Asiatic sovereign and his seraglio in which fools do not succeed. The sultans have rarely promoted, rarely even used, men of their own house,—which is the Persian dynastic policy,—have hated, and at last destroyed, the few nobles of their empire; and capricious and cruel as they have been, have often shown a power of steadily⁸ upholding a great servant such as we all attribute to the

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