"It is impossible," says Mr. Urquhart, "to witness the arrival of the many-tongued caravan at its resting-place for the night, and see, unladen and piled up together, the bales from such distant places—to glance over their very wrappers, and the strange marks and characters which they bear—without being amazed at so eloquent a contradiction of our preconceived notions of indiscriminate despotism and universal insecurity of the East. But while we observe the avidity with which our goods are sought, the preference now transferred from Indian to Birmingham muslins, from Golconda to Glasgow chintzes, from Damascus to Sheffield steel, from Cashmere shawls to English broadcloth; and while, at the same time, the energies of their commercial spirit are brought thus substantially before us; it is indeed impossible not to regret that a gulf of separation should have so long divided the East and the West, and equally impossible not to indulge in the hope and anticipation of a vastly extended traffic with the East, and of all the blessings which follow fast and welling in the wake of commerce."—P. 133.
Among the "blessings" of the system is the fact that local places of exchange no longer exist. The storekeeper who pays rent and taxes has found himself unable to compete with the pedler who pays neither; and the consequence is that the poor cultivator finds it impossible to exchange his products, small as they are, for the commodities he needs, except, on the occasional arrival of a caravan, and that has generally proved far more likely to absorb the little money in circulation, than any of the more bulky and less valuable products of the earth.
As usual in purely agricultural countries, the whole body of cultivators is hopelessly in debt, and the money-lender fleeces all. If he aids the peasant before harvest, he must have an enormous interest, and be paid in produce at a large discount from the market price; The village communities are almost universally in debt, but to them, as the security is good, the banker charges only twenty per cent. per annum. Turkey is the very paradise of middlemen—a consequence of the absence of any mode of employment except in cultivation or in trade; and the moral effect of this may be seen in the following passage:—
"If you see," says Urquhart, "a Turk meditating in a corner, it is on some speculation—the purchase of a revenue farm, or the propriety of a loan at sixty per cent.; if you see pen or paper in his hand, it is making or checking an account; if there is a disturbance in the street, it is a disputed barter; whether in the streets or in-doors, whether in a coffeehouse, a serai, or a bazaar, whatever the rank, nation, language of the persons around you, traffic, barter, gain are the prevailing impulses; grusch, para, florin, lira, asper, amid the Babel of tongues, are the universally intelligible sounds."—P. 138.
We have thus a whole people divided into two classes—the plunderers and the plundered; and the cause of this may be found in the fact that the owners and occupants of land have never been permitted to strengthen themselves by the formation of that natural alliance between the plough and the loom, the hammer and the harrow, so much admired by Adam Smith. The government is as weak as the people, for it is so entirely dependent on the bankers, that they may be regarded as the real owners of the land and the people, taxing them at discretion; and to them certainly enure all the profits of cultivation. As a consequence of this, the land is almost valueless. A recent traveller states that good land maybe purchased in the immediate vicinity of Smyrna at six cents an acre, and at a little distance vast quantities may be had for nothing. Throughout the world, the freedom of man has grown in the ratio of the increase in the value of land, and that has always grown in the ratio of the tendency to have the artisan take his place by the side of the cultivator of the earth. Whatever tends to prevent this natural association tends, therefore, to the debasement and enslavement of man.
The weakness of Turkey, as regards foreign nations, is great, and it increases every day.[54] Not only ambassadors, but consuls, beard it in its own cities; and it is now even denied that she has any right to adopt a system of trade different from that under which she has become thus weakened. Perfect freedom of commerce is declared to be "one of those immunities which we can resign on no account or pretext whatever; it is a golden privilege, which we can never abandon."[55]
Internal trade scarcely exists; and, as a natural consequence, the foreign one is insignificant, the whole value of the exports being but about thirty-three millions of dollars, or less than two dollars per head. The total exports from Great Britain in the last year amounted to but £2,221,000, ($11,500,000,) much of which was simply en route for Persia; and this constitutes the great trade that has been built up at so much cost to the people of Turkey, and that is to be maintained as "a golden privilege" not to be abandoned! Not discouraged by the result of past efforts, the same author looks forward anxiously for the time when there shall be in Turkey no employment in manufactures of any kind, and when the people shall be exclusively employed in agriculture; and that time cannot, he thinks, be far distant, as "a few pence more or less in the price of a commodity will make the difference of purchasing or manufacturing at home."[56]
Throughout his book he shows that the rudeness of the machinery of cultivation is in the direct ratio of the distance of the cultivator from market; and yet he would desire that all the produce of the country should go to a distant market to be exchanged, although the whole import of iron at the present moment for the supply of a population of almost twenty millions of people, possessing iron ore, fuel, and unemployed labour in unlimited quantity, is but £2500 per annum, or about a penny's worth for every thirty persons! Need we wonder at the character of the machinery, the poverty and slavery of the people, the trivial amount of commerce, or at the weakness of a government whose whole system looks to the exhaustion of the land, and to the exclusion of that great middle class of working-men, to whom the agriculturist has everywhere been indebted for his freedom?
The facts thus far given have been taken, as the reader will have observed, from Mr. Urquhart's work; and as that gentleman is a warm admirer of the system denounced by Adam Smith, he cannot be suspected of any exaggeration when presenting any of its unfavourable results. Later travellers exhibit the nation as passing steadily onward toward ruin, and the people toward a state of slavery the most, complete—the necessary consequence of a policy that excludes the mechanic and prevents the formation of a town population. Among the latest of those travellers is Mr. Mac Farlane,[57] at the date of whose visit the silk manufacture had entirely disappeared, and even the filatures for preparing the raw silk were closed, weavers having become ploughmen, and women and children having been totally deprived of employment. The cultivators of silk had become entirely dependent on foreign markets in which there existed no demand for the products of their land and labour. England was then passing through one of her periodical crises, and it had been deemed necessary to put down the prices of all agricultural products, with a view to stop importation. On one occasion, during Mr. Mac Farlane's travels, there came a report that silk had risen in England, and it produced a momentary stir and animation, that, as he says, "flattered his national vanity to think that an electric touch parting from London, the mighty heart of commerce, should thus be felt in a few days at a place like Biljek." Such is commercial centralization! It renders the agriculturists of the world mere slaves, dependent for food and clothing upon the will of a few people, proprietors of a small amount of machinery, at "the mighty heart of commerce." At one moment speculation is rife, and silk goes up in price, and then every effort is made to induce large shipments of the raw produce of the world. At the next, money is said to be scarce, and the shippers are ruined, as was, to so great an extent, experienced by those who exported corn from this country in 1847.
At the date of the traveller's first visit to Broussa, the villages were numerous, and the silk manufacture was prosperous. At the second, the silk works were stopped and their owners bankrupt, the villages were gradually disappearing, and in the town itself scarcely a chimney was left, while the country around presented to view nothing but poverty and wretchedness. Everywhere, throughout the empire, the roads are bad, and becoming worse, and the condition of the cultivator deteriorates; for if he has a surplus to sell, most of its value at market is absorbed by the cost of transportation, and if his crop is short, prices rise so high that he cannot purchase. Famines are therefore frequent, and child-murder prevails throughout all classes of society. Population therefore diminishes, and the best lands are abandoned, "nine-tenths" of them remaining untilled;[58] the natural consequence of which is, that malaria prevails in many of those parts of the country that once were most productive, and pestilence comes in aid of famine for the extermination of this unfortunate people. Native mechanics are nowhere to be found, there being no demand for them, and the plough, the wine-press, and the oil-mill are equally rude and barbarous. The product of labour is, consequently, most diminutive, and its wages twopence a day, with a little food. The interest of money varies from 25 to 50 per cent. per annum, and this rate is frequently paid for the loan of bad seed that yields but little to either land or labour.