again. Nor will it do to say, that it is the oppression of the
Turkish government which occasions this desolation and destruction of
the rural population; for many parts of Turkey are not only well
cultivated but most densely peopled; as, for example, the broad tract of
Mount Hoemus, where agriculture is in as admirable a state as in the
mountains of Tuscany or Switzerland. "No peasantry in the world," says
Slade, "are so well off as those of Bulgaria; the lowest of them has
abundance of every thing--meat, poultry, eggs, milk, rice, cheese, wine,
bread, good clothing, a warm dwelling, and a horse to ride; where is the
tyranny under which the Christian subjects of the Porte are generally
supposed to dwell? Among the Bulgarians certainly. I wish that, in every
country, a traveller could pass from one end to the other, and find a
good supper and warm fire in every cottage, as he can in this part of
European Turkey."[46] Clarke gives the same account of the peasantry of
Parnassus and Olympia; and it is true generally of almost all the
_mountain_ districts of Turkey. How, then, does it happen that the rich
and level plains of Romelia, at the gates of Constantinople, and thence
over a breadth of an hundred and twenty miles to Adrianople, is a
desert? Slade has explained it in a word. "_Constantinople depends on
Odessa for its daily bread._" The cry for cheap bread in Constantinople,
its noble harbour, and ready communication by water with Egypt on the
one hand, and the Ukraine on the other, have done the whole. Romelia,
like the Campagna of Rome, is a desert, because the market of
Constantinople is lost to the Turkish cultivators; because grain can be
brought cheaper from the Nile and the Wolga than raised at home, in
consequence of the cheapness of labour in those remote provinces; and
because the Turkish government, dreading an insurrection in the capital,
have done nothing to protect native industry.

There are many countries to whom the most unlimited freedom in the
importation of corn can do no injury. There are, in the first place, the
great grain countries, such as Poland and the Ukraine: they have no more
reason to dread the importation of grain than Newcastle that of coals,
or the Scotch Highlands that of moor-game. In the next place, countries
which _are poor_ need never fear the importation of corn from abroad;
for they have no money to pay for it; and, if they had, it would not be
brought in at a profit, because cu