rant and barbarous a people."

The state of the population is in keeping with the neglected condition
of the country. It is, down to the present time, wasting away; and that
there are inhabitants at all seems in the main referable to merely
accidental causes. On the road from Angora to Constantinople there were
old people, twenty years since, who remembered as many as forty or fifty
villages, where now there are none; and in the middle of the last
century two hundred places had become forsaken in the tract lying
between those two cities and Smyrna.[52]

This desolation is no accident of a declining empire; it dates from the
very time that a Turk first came into the country, from the era of the
Seljukian Sultans, eight hundred years ago. We have indirect but clear
proof of it in the course of history following their expulsion from the
country by the Crusaders. For a while the Greeks recovered their
dominion in its western portion, and fixed their imperial residence at
Nicaea, which had been the capital of the Seljukians. A vigorous prince
mounted the throne, and the main object of his exertions and the special
work of his reign was the recovery of the soil. We are told by an
English historian,[53] that he found the most fertile lands without
either cultivation or inhabitants, and he took them into his own
management. It followed that, in the course of some years, the imperial
domain became the granary and garden of Asia; and the sovereign made
money without impoverishing his people. According to the nature of the
soil, he sowed it with corn, or planted it with vines, or laid it down
in grass: his pastures abounded with herds and flocks, horses and swine;
and his speculation, as it may be called, in poultry was so happy, that
he was able to present his empress with a crown of pearls and diamonds
out of his gains. His example encouraged his nobles to imitation; and
they learned to depend for their incomes on the honourable proceeds of
their estates, instead of oppressing their people, and seeking favours
from the court. Such was the immediate consequence when man cooeperated
with the bountifulness of nature in this fruitful region; and it brings
out prominently by its contrast the wretchedness of the Turkish
domination.

6.

That wretchedness is found, not in Asia Minor only, but wherever Turks
are to be found in power. Throughout the whole extent of their
territory, if you believe the report of travellers, the peasa