These officials being originally of the people, it may be supposed, would feel some sympathy for them; but the moment they come into power, they become an exclusive class. Because in Turkey the patriarchal idea that everything belongs to the sovereign, has led them to regard the government as not made for the people, but the people for the government; they think, therefore, that all advantages should accrue not to the governed but to the governing, thus reducing the mass into the state of individual nonentities, or mere conduits for the resources of the empire. The persons in authority seek, therefore, only the prosperity of the government, and constitute, as it were, a sort of fiscal administration, rather than one mindful of the good of the commonwealth. Hence, whenever a project of public utility is proposed, the first idea that crosses the mind of a Turkish functionary, is what direct advantage may accrue to the government? With such perverted ideas, the aristocracy, who are termed par excellence the Kibars, though few in numbers, are like leaven to the whole mass; domineering, exciting, and often corrupting the best materials; and as men are creatures of circumstances, their moral and temporal conditions are but the results of the good or bad government under which they live. The evils, corruptions, and miseries existing in a community, are not therefore to be attributed to the mass indiscriminately, but rather to the influences that surround them.
Baluk bashdan Kokar is a common proverb with the Osmanlis, or as is the fountain so will be the streams which flow from it; therefore a government which exercises its prerogatives to revenge, not to punish; to remove the offender, not to benefit others by making an example of him; to deal death-blows to all who stand in the way; to encourage self-aggrandizement rather than study the wants of the community; to prefer the intriguant before the patriot; to patronize the buffoon rather than the statesman; such a government cannot fail to stamp its sanguinary and arbitrary character upon its subjects.
A country where the insidious poison is ever at hand, and where the innocent and new-born infant who may endanger the heirs to the throne is forced to yield the life it has but just received; in such a land the same scenes will be enacted in its darkest corners, and the peasant will mimic the lord as far as he dares.
