2.
Such is that internal peculiarity, the presence of which constitutes a civilized, the absence a barbarous people; which makes a people great, and small again; and which, just consistently with the notion of their being barbarians, I cannot discern, for strength or for weakness, in the Turks. On the contrary, almost all the elements of their success, and instruments of their downfall, are external to themselves. For instance, their religion, one of their principal bonds, owes nothing to them; it is, not only in substance, but in concrete shape, just what it was when it came to them. I cannot find that they have commented upon it; I cannot find that they are the channels of any of those famous traditions by which the Koran is interpreted, and which they themselves accept; or that they have exercised their minds upon it at all, except so far as they have been obliged, in a certain degree, to do so in the administration of the law. It is true also that they have been obliged to choose to be Sunnites and not Shiahs; but, considering the latter sect arose in Persia, since the date of the Turkish occupation of Constantinople, it was really no choice at all. They have but remained as they were. Besides, the Shiahs maintain the hereditary transmission of the Caliphate, which would exclude the line of Othman from the succession—good reason then the Turks should be Sunnites; and the dates of the two events so nearly coincide, that one could even fancy that the Shiahs actually arose in consequence of the Sultan Selim's carrying off the last of the Abassides from Egypt, and gaining the transference of the Caliphate from his captive. Besides, if it is worth while pursuing the point, did they not remain Sunnites, they would have to abandon the traditional or oral law, and must cease to use the labours of its four great doctors, which would be to bring upon themselves an incalculable extent of intellectual toil; for without recognized comments on the Koran, neither the religion nor the civil state could be made to work.
The divine right of the line of Othman is another of their special political bonds, and this too is shown by the following extract from a well-known historian,[88] if it needs showing, to be simply external to themselves: "The origin of the Sultans," he says, "is obscure; but this sacred and indefeasible right" to the throne, "which no time can erase, and no violence can infringe, was soon and unalterably implanted in the minds of their subjects. A weak or vicious Sultan may be deposed and strangled, but his inheritance devolves to an infant or an idiot; nor has the most daring rebel presumed to ascend the throne of his lawful sovereign. While the transient dynasties of Asia have been continually subverted by a crafty visir in the palace, or a victorious general in the camp, the Ottoman succession has been confirmed by the practice of five centuries, and is now incorporated with the vital principle of the Turkish nation." Here we have on the one hand the imperial succession described as an element of the political life of the Osmanlis—on the other as an appointment over which they have no power; and obviously it is from its very nature independent of them. It is a form of life external to the community it vivifies.
Probably it was the wonderful continuity of so many great Sultans in their early ages, which wrought in their minds the idea of a divine mission as the attribute of the dynasty; and its acquisition of the Caliphate would fix it indelibly within them. And here again, we have another special instrument of their imperial greatness, but still an external one. I have already had occasion to observe, that barbarians make conquests by means of great men, in whom they, as it were, live; ten successive monarchs, of extraordinary vigour and talent, carried on the Ottomans to empire. Will any one show that those monarchs can be fairly called specimens of the nation, any more than Zingis was the specimen of the Tartars? Have they not rather acted as the Deus è machinâ, carrying on the drama, which has languished or stopped, since the time when they ceased to animate it? Contrast the Ottoman history in this respect with the rise of the Anglo-Indian Empire, or with the military successes of Great Britain under the Regency; or again with the literary eminence of England under Charles the Second or even Anne, which owed little to those monarchs. Kings indeed at various periods have been most effective patrons of art and science; but the question is, not whether English or French literature has ever been indebted to royal encouragement, but whether the Ottomans can do anything at all, as a nation, without it.
Indeed, I should like it investigated what internal history the Ottomans have at all; what inward development of any kind they have made since they crossed Mount Olympus and planted themselves in Broussa; how they have changed shape and feature, even in lesser matters, since they were a state, or how they are a year older than when they first came into being. We see among them no representative of Confucius, Chi-hoagti, and the sect of Ta-osse; no magi; no Pisistratus and Harmodius; no Socrates and Alcibiades; no patricians and plebeians; no Cæsar; no invasion or adoption of foreign mysteries; no mythical impersonation of an Ali; no Suffeeism; no Guelphs and Gibellines; nothing really on the type of Catholic religious orders; no Luther; nothing, in short, which, for good or evil, marks the presence of a life internal to the political community itself. Some authors indeed maintain they have a literature; but I cannot ascertain what the assertion is worth. Rather the tenor of their annals runs thus:—Two Pachas make war against each other, and a kat-sherif comes from Constantinople for the head of the one or the other; or a Pacha exceeds in pillaging his province, or acts rebelliously, and is preferred to a higher government and suddenly strangled on his way to it; or he successfully maintains himself, and gains an hereditary settlement, still subject, however, to the feudal tenure, which is the principle of the political structure, continuing to send his contingent of troops, when the Sultan goes to war, and remitting the ordinary taxes through his agent at Court. Such is the staple of Turkish history, whether amid the hordes of Turkistan, or the feudatory Turcomans of Anatolia, or the imperial Osmanlis.