(4) Arab Khan Medressesi has only a few cells, but is richly endowed.
(5) Shirgazi Khan Medressesi.
These Medresse are the only edifices in the midst of the mud huts that deserve the name of houses. Their courts are for the most part kept clean, are planted with trees, or used as gardens. Of the subjects in which instruction is given we will speak hereafter, remarking only by the way, that the lectures themselves are delivered in the cells of the professors, to groups of scholars ranged together according to the degree of their intellectual capacity.
Police.
In each quarter of the town there is a Mirab, [Footnote 108] responsible by day for the public order of his district, in case of any rioting, theft, or other crime. The charge of the city after sunset is entrusted to the four Pasheb (chief watchmen), who are bound to patrol the whole night before the gate of the citadel. Each of them has eight under-watchmen subject to his orders, who are at the same time public executioners. These, in all thirty-two in number, go about the city, and arrest everyone who shows himself in the streets half an hour after midnight. Their particular attention is directed to burglars, or to the heroes of the intrigues proscribed by the law: woe to those caught in flagrante delicto!
[Footnote 108: A Mirab is the same as the Turkish Subashi, a functionary, that has played his part from the Chinese frontier to the Adriatic, and still continues to do so.]
B. THE KHAN AND HIS GOVERNMENT.
That the Khan of Khiva can dispose despotically, according to his good pleasure, of the property and lives of his subjects, scarcely requires to be mentioned. In his character of Lord of the Land, he is what every father is at the head of his family: just as the latter, when he pleases, gives ear to a slave, so the Khan pays attention occasionally to the words of a minister; nor is there any barrier to the capricious use of his authority, except that inspired by the Ulemas, when these have at their head such men as, by their learning and irreproachable lives, have conciliated the affection of the people, and rendered themselves objects of dread to the Khan. Matters stand so with almost all the Governments of Asia, but this is not altogether to be ascribed to the defects or entire absence of forms of government. No; in all times, and in all epochs of history, forms intended for controlling the tyrannical and capricious exercise of [{335}] power have existed in theory, and have only remained inoperative from that weakness of character and that deficiency of the nobler sentiments in the masses at large which have, throughout the East, ever favoured, as they still continue to do, every crime of the sovereign.
According to the Khivan Constitution, which is of Mongol origin, he is