of the army and the civil service, make it possible
for men of the lowest birth to attain to the highest power. The immense
and complicated bureaucracy is not in the hands of any one class of the
people; its prizes are won by men of all sorts and conditions, who
continue to pursue their own interests and fortunes with undiminished
energy, when they ought to be devoting their whole powers to the service
of the country. Their power is indeed checked by the centralization of
all the executive faculties in the person of the sovereign. Without the
Sultan's signature the minister of war cannot order a gun to be cast in
the arsenal of Tophane, the minister of marine cannot buy a ton of coal
for the ironclads which lie behind Galata bridge in the Golden Horn, the
minister of foreign affairs cannot give a reply to an ambassador, nor
can the minister of justice avail himself of the machinery of the law.
Every smallest act must be justified by the Sultan's own signature, and
the chief object of all diplomacy from without, and of all personal
intrigue from within, is to obtain this imperial consent to measures
suggested by considerations of private advantage or public necessity.
The Ottoman Empire may be described as an irregular democracy, whose
acts are all subject to the veto of an absolute autocrat. The officials
pass their lives in proposing, and his Majesty very generally spends his
time in opposing, all manner of schemes, good, bad, and indifferent. The
contradictory nature of the system produces the anomalous position
occupied by the Ottoman Empire in Europe.

The fact that there is no aristocracy and the seclusion of women among
the Mussulmans are the chief reasons why there is no native society, in
our sense of the word. A few of the great Greek families still survive,
descendants of those Fanariotes whose ancestors had played an important
part in the decadence of the Eastern Empire. A certain number of
Armenians who have gained wealth and influence follow more or less
closely the customs of the West. But beyond these few there cannot be
said to be many houses of the social kind. Two or three pashas, of
European origin, and Christians by religion, mix with their families in
the gayety of Pera and the Bosphorus. A few Turkish officers, and
Prussian officers in Turkish service, show their brilliant uniforms in
the ball-rooms, and occasionally some high official of the Porte appears
at formal receptions; but on the whole the