Des rapports observés entre les moyens d’existence et l’organisation sociale de quelques peuples d’e

CHAP. 32: > Of the relations observed between the means of existence and the social organization of some peoples of the Caucasian species of northwest Africa. — Of the kind of inequality that has existed or that still exists among these peoples. — Constitution of a military aristocracy.

The peoples whose social state I now have to describe are better known than most of those of whom I have spoken in the preceding chapters. We know better what is the manner in which the diverse fractions of the population have organized themselves to secure means of existence, and what are the effects that have resulted from the employment of these means. Here, we still find men organized for the exploitation of a conquered people: we see, on one side, a military aristocracy living in opulence, and compensating for its lack of numbers by the strength of its organization; and, on the other side, a numerous population placed on a fertile soil, but living in profound misery, and incapable of resisting, because it is disunited. It is by observing the organization of the dominators and the effects that have resulted from the exercise of their power that we will learn to know the essential conditions for a people’s liberty: if we want to know what the consequences of despotism are, we must first study the elements that constitute it.

When historical facts go back to times that are unknown to us, it is a vain enterprise to claim to expound the particular causes that brought them about. However painful, in such a case, the state of doubt and ignorance may be, it is impossible to emerge from it without abandoning the only road that is proper to lead us in the search for truth. I will not, therefore, attempt to explain what were the causes that produced the social order observed in Egypt in the most remote times; for I could form, in this regard, only vague conjectures; it will be sufficient for me to expound its principal features, those that appear at once the best-established and the most fecund in consequences.

Egypt, in the most ancient times of which we have knowledge, seemed to be subject to only a single chief, to whom the Egyptians gave the name of pharaoh, and whom we designate by the name of king. This king transmitted his power to one of his children, and his person was no less inviolable nor less sacred than that of the kings of Abyssinia. Was this chief originally the general of a conquering army? Did he seize public authority by the conquest of the country and its inhabitants? Was he at first an elective magistrate, and did he succeed in perpetuating his power in his family by an usurpation? Did the Egyptians give themselves a single magistrate to protect themselves from the dangers of deliberations? Did they make his power hereditary to prevent the troubles of elections? We do not know; but it is probable that there, as elsewhere, the facts long preceded the doctrines, and that, when a certain order of things had been established on the ruins of a different order, there was no lack of reasons to prove the advantages of the one and the disadvantages of the other.

The Egyptians had in appearance only one hereditary chief; but, in reality, they were governed, or, to put it better, possessed by a priestly caste; they were subject to the most energetic aristocracy that has perhaps ever existed. The king was raised, fed, served, and counseled by priests; he had no other thoughts than those they had engraved in his mind; he executed no actions other than those they advised him. He found himself in their hands from his childhood until his death; for he was always surrounded by six councilors, and these councilors were chosen from among them. If the reigning dynasty happened to die out, the priests elected a new one from their caste; the king was therefore only a first pontiff; he was a kind of idol that the priests presented for the adoration of the people, an idol which, having no idea of its own, was endowed with the faculty of manifesting, in its own name, the wills of the men who possessed it.

The priests transmitted their power to their children, and never communicated it to individuals who were not born in their caste; they had, moreover, the monopoly of knowledge, and spoke among themselves only a language unintelligible to the rest of the population; they could not, therefore, be convicted of errors, contradictions, or incapacity; nothing could weaken the superstitious respect they inspired in the multitude for their persons, nor bring their subjects out of the state of brutishness and dependence in which they had placed them.

The priests formed the first class in the State; the second was composed of the military, who had the king for their chief, and who, consequently, obeyed only the priests.

The lands were divided into three parts: the first belonged to the priests; the second belonged to the king, and its revenues were employed to pay his councilors and his ministers who were priests; the third belonged to the soldiers, that is to say, to the guardians and defenders of the priests [156].According to historians, all the advantages of the social order were possessed by one caste, whose perpetual enjoyment of them was guaranteed by the necessity in which everyone, from the prince to the laborer, found himself to follow the profession and preserve the rank of his father. This order, however foreign it may be to our current morals, has nothing extraordinary about it; it is that toward which men in all countries tend who, by cunning or by violence, have succeeded in making themselves masters of their fellows.

History has not taught us the epoch at which the Egyptians were thus divided into diverse castes, and where each individual found himself circumscribed, at birth, within a circle from which he was forbidden to exit; but one can believe without temerity that, when one part of the population decided to place insurmountable limits on the intelligence, industry, and consequently the wealth of all the others, society had made great progress. If the first men who cultivated the land or built huts had never been able to do anything else; if none of their descendants had been able to practice any profession other than that of their ancestors, Egypt would never have had priests or kings; it would never have had mathematicians, architects, or astronomers. Although historians have not made known to us the order in which the arts and institutions of this people were formed, it is at least permissible to doubt whether the monuments whose ruins still excite the admiration of travelers were the work of architects by right of birth [157].

The exclusive possession of the lands by the soldiers and priests, and the necessity imposed on each to follow the profession of his father, may lead one to think that, in a time of which history has not preserved the memory, the soil and the cultivators of Egypt were the prey of a conquering army; for it would be difficult to see by what other title the lands would have fallen to two classes that, in no country, are noted for their love of labor.

Possessors of the most considerable part of the lands, the priests also possessed the only dwellings that announced wealth and power. A traveler, visiting the places where the most famous cities were, was astonished to find ruins of the same nature.

“Always temples!” he says, “not one public building; not one house that had enough substance to resist time [158].”

If the temples were so magnificent, if they were so numerous, it is because they were the abode of the priests; they were doubtless raised in honor of the divinities of the country, as oxen were sacrificed in Rome in honor of Jupiter; but the gods of Egypt took up no more space in their temples than the god of the Capitol did at the table of his ministers. The temples of ancient Egypt, considering them from their true point of view, were but the palaces of the grandees; palaces that an aristocracy at once territorial and sacerdotal had had built for itself under sacred names, by the industrious part of the population [159].

When a conquering army finds, in a country it invades, a powerful aristocracy and a miserable populace that feeds it, the former is ordinarily condemned to perish. If it is not exterminated at the moment of conquest, or if it does not die in the defense of its possessions, it is condemned to die out in contempt and misery. It is incapable of giving itself over to the labors that could make it subsist, or it disdains them, because the habit of domination has made them vile in its eyes. The new dominators sometimes employ it partially as a means of action over the slaves; but soon they rid themselves of it, because its pretensions inspire mistrust in them, and they can find complete security only in its destruction. The enslaved part of the population is preserved, on the contrary, because it alone knows how to cultivate the land or practice the arts; because it produces more than it consumes, and because its new possessors can exist only by it.

The soil of Egypt, taken from the industrious part of the population by its kings, its soldiers, and its priests, has passed successively under the domination of the Assyrians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Mamluks, and the Turks. Under Cambyses and his successors, Egypt saw the race of its first masters disappear; its hereditary soldiers were exterminated, its priests debased and despoiled, its kings expelled. The Greeks in their turn destroyed or expelled the Assyrian dominators, and put themselves in their place. The Roman conquerors destroyed or drove out the Greek masters, and were destroyed by Arab conquerors. The Arabs were enslaved or dispossessed by soldiers they had bought as slaves. These latter were then subjugated by the Turks, who ended by extinguishing their race.

If historians foreign to Egypt had not made it known to us that it had kings, soldiers, and priests whose power was hereditary, we would be ignorant that they existed, or we could form only conjectures in this regard. This first race of masters has become so completely extinct that nothing remains to recall its memory but a few debris of monuments and the testimony of foreign historians; with them perished their language, their knowledge, their religion, and their beliefs. The destruction of most of the other races of dominators has been no less complete; one would search in vain on the soil of Egypt for descendants of the Assyrian, Greek, or Roman conquerors; if a few Arabs still remain, they are, if one may be permitted to express it thus, only instruments of cultivation.

But the race of men primitively enslaved has not likewise disappeared; it has in large part been preserved through all the revolutions; its morals and its customs have resisted the violence of the conquerors. Its first possessors had taken from it the property of the soil on which it lived; they had condemned it to labors and to a brutishness without end. It has not been able to emerge from the debasement into which its ancestors were plunged; it has not been able to retake the properties that were ravished from them, nor acquire the enlightenment of which its first possessors deprived it; but it has always remained neutral in the quarrels that have arisen between the conquerors. It has seen them destroy one another, while it has in part perpetuated itself and is still preserved such as it existed more than two thousand years ago.

“I can appreciate,” says Savary, “only the part (of Herodotus’s history) that treats of Egypt, and it is with the greatest satisfaction that I have found again in this country the morals, the customs that he described, with some slight modifications that the change of dominations and religion have introduced there [160].”

To trace the picture of the morals of the inhabitants of Egypt, the population must be divided into two classes: that of the dominators or masters who, at diverse epochs, have formed the aristocracy, and that of the subjects or slaves who composed the mass of the population. The morals of the masters have not always been the same: the conquerors who have successively invaded this country brought to it the morals or customs that were proper to their nation. They have been more or less oppressive, more or less vicious, according as the people to whom they belonged was more or less barbarous [161].

We know only in a very imperfect manner the morals of the first possessors, those of the triple territorial, sacerdotal, and military aristocracy, which first made itself mistress of the men and the soil. This aristocracy, like that of the Malays in the islands of the great Ocean, seems to have attached esteem only to the essential qualities that constituted it, and to have debased any quality that could have been acquired by the subjugated race. Modesty, chastity were not virtues; for, if they had been esteemed, the wives of the subjects could have had rights to esteem as well as the wives of the masters.

When, toward the middle of the sixth century, the Arabs took Egypt from the Greek emperors of Constantinople, this country had already suffered much from the domination of the diverse masters who had possessed it. However, it was still very flourishing, if one judges by the enthusiasm that the capture of Alexandria inspired in these new conquerors, and by the description that they themselves have given us of this city [162]. Egypt, although often torn by the quarrels of the Arabs who disputed power, did not fall into barbarism. Geometry, astronomy, grammar, poetry were cultivated, and the arts were not neglected. Agriculture even made some progress under the caliphs, since it is under their domination that the cultivation of rice was introduced [163].

One of the Arab chiefs to whom Egypt was subject, doubtless proposing to increase his power, instituted a militia that was foreign at once to the Egyptians and to his own nation. Salah-Nuginmeddin buys from the Tatars the slaves they come to sell in Cairo; he has them trained according to his views, and forms a military corps from them. These soldiers are designated by the name of Mamluks, a term that signifies slaves. When these slaves have become numerous enough and powerful enough to overcome the resistance their master wished to surmount, they massacre him, and put in his place a man taken from among them. They thus prove that a prince who fears the strength of his nation and who wants to overcome it, is obliged to create a greater force that also has a will and interests that sooner or later it knows how to make triumph [164].

A purely military aristocracy succeeds the government of the Arabs, which was also military. The sovereign power is found in the hands of the principal officers of the slaves, called sangiaks, and whom we designate by the title of beys. These grandees choose from among them a chief, charged with governing under their direction; he is their president, or to put it better, the general-in-chief of the army; he is designated by the name of sultan. The country is, moreover, divided into twenty-four fractions, one for each of the principal officers or beys. The foreign army, created by the Arab chiefs, continues to be recruited in the same manner as it had begun. Each of the beys has young slaves bought in Cairo or Constantinople, who are brought there from Georgia, Circassia, Natolia, and sometimes even from Nubia. These slaves, most of whom are born of Christian parents, are, upon arriving in their master's house, circumcised, and instructed in the religion of Muhammad. They are, at the same time, trained to handle a horse, to throw the javelin, to use the saber and firearms. They fill in the interior of the house the diverse offices for which their education and their natural dispositions make them suited. They are obliged to shave and to live in celibacy until they are raised to some dignity; then they let their beards grow and can marry. Having arrived at the rank of cachef, they are charged with the exploitation of the towns placed under the dependence of their patron; they buy on their own account slaves who become their guards, and they train them as they themselves were trained. They have but one more step to take to arrive at the dignity of bey [165].

The influence of each bey or sangiak, being in proportion to the number, talents, and strength of his slaves, each has the greatest interest in multiplying his own and in making them formidable: they are for him the only means of power and security. A sangiak, within the extent of the lands subject to his exploitation, never has for subordinates any but men chosen by him from among his own slaves. Each province, each district has its governor, each village its lieutenant, everywhere mayors who watch over the movements of the multitude.

“The system of oppression,” says Volney in expounding this organization, “is methodical; one would say that everywhere tyrants have innate science [166].”

The power and properties of a bey do not pass to his children; when he dies, the other beys grant them to the slave or freedman whom they judge most worthy of them, or, to put it better, to the one who shows himself most devoted to the interests of the majority of the electors; the interest of the family is sacrificed to the interest of the military occupation. If a son succeeded to his father's power, the military aristocracy could fall into hands incapable of preserving it, and the enslaved population could sooner or later free itself; but by making authority pass into the hands of the most audacious and most skillful freedmen, the bonds of servitude never slacken; military subordination, moreover, preserves all its power, and the ambition of all is constantly stimulated by the hope of advancement. The custom of the beys of having their authority and their fortune pass to men who were bought as slaves is so respected that it is without example that any one of them has attempted to violate it in favor of one of his children [167].

In almost all countries where conquerors establish themselves, they end by more or less merging with the conquered population; they take, at least in part, its morals, its language, its religion, and even its laws. If their descendants preserve a part of the advantages that force gave them, they at least consider themselves a fraction of the same people; both have a common denomination [168].

The Mamluks, from the establishment of their power until their destruction, are all of foreign origin; they are almost all brought into the country in the capacity of slaves, and bought as such to contribute to the exploitation of the conquered population. But what becomes of their children? Do they fall into the ranks of the possessed men, or do they form a distinct class? The Mamluks, as long as they have not attained any employment, are entirely slaves and cannot marry: most therefore always remain bachelors. Those who marry do not wed women who belong to the exploited population, Coptic or Arab women; they marry young slaves who have the same origin as they, or who are bought from peoples of the same race. Now, the individuals who belonged to these peoples, when they do not unite with natives, cannot reproduce beyond the second generation. The race of freed slaves, refusing, out of pride or for other causes, to ally with the exploited population, is thus condemned by nature to die out or to be ceaselessly recruited from abroad [169].

But, although foreigners by birth, the Mamluks nonetheless consider Egypt as their own country; habit and education make each one lose the memory of his parents and of the place where he received life; brought from different countries, they have no common interest by their origin; they are linked among themselves only by the interest of a common exploitation [170].

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the sultan of the Turks, Selim, invaded Egypt and dethroned the sultan of the Mamluks. After having put him to flight, he recalls him, gives him back the government; but, soon after, he has him hanged at the gate of Cairo. Whether it was that, by this act of rigor, he had compromised his authority, or that he wished to show himself generous toward the vanquished, he consented to treat with them: he granted them a charter. In the preamble of this charter, he admits the existence of the republican government of the twenty-four beys, but under the following conditions: that they themselves will recognize the sovereignty of the sultan of Constantinople and that of his successors; that they will receive, as his representative, the lieutenant it shall please him to send them; that they will pay him a tribute in money and in goods; that, during war, they will furnish him twelve thousand men of whom they themselves will have the command, and that, during peace, they may not maintain more than fourteen thousand soldiers or janissaries. The beys are authorized to suspend the sultan's lieutenant, in the case where he should attack their privileges, that is to say, their absolute power over the enslaved population [171].

The military occupation that had replaced the domination of the Arabs therefore continues to exist after the conquest of the Turks. The pasha sent to Egypt at first has all the authority that the memory of a recent victory produces; but, arriving in the country without any force of his own, his authority is insensibly reduced to that which intrigue can give him. In recent times, he is but a phantom that one overturns with a breath: the beys, at the head of the armies and the provinces, really enjoy all the power; they leave a pasha in place only as long as he favors their designs. If this representative of the sultan dares to raise his voice to defend the interests of his master, the divan or council of the sangiaks assembles instantly and dismisses him. Sometimes, the sangiaks do not even leave him the time to enter into his functions; they oblige him to leave Egypt as soon as he has set foot there; if he is received, he does not have the liberty to leave his palace without the permission of the chief of the beys; he is a prisoner of state who, in the midst of the splendor with which he is surrounded, feels harshly the weight of his chains; thus, the post he occupies is considered only as a sort of exile [172].The sangiaks, having for their chief one of their own to whom they give the title of sheikh el-balad (the elder of the country), thus share, as they did before the victory of the Turks, the exploitation of Egypt. Each of them places, at every point of the country subject to his command, from the most considerable cities to the smallest villages, a man chosen from among his slaves and charged with exploiting his share of the territory. To support the beys and their agents, there is furthermore a subordinate army also composed of foreigners: these are Janissaries, having the same origin, the same privileges, and the same organization as those who exist in the cities subject to the Turkish empire.

These Janissaries are ordinarily men whom their disorders or their crimes have obliged to banish themselves from their native country [173]: some succeed to the military power of their fathers [174]; several, even among those whom their crimes have had chased from Constantinople, engage in commerce [175]; but almost all live in disorder, dispense with military service, and roam the cities to seize the opportunity to give themselves over to theft and pillage [176].

The Janissaries, although otherwise subject to the beys, have the privilege of being arrested and punished only by men of their own corps, whatever the crimes of which they have made themselves guilty. Thus, in general, the only crimes punished are those that harm military interests; actions that offend only the men of the enslaved class are not ranked as offenses and remain without punishment, when it is the masters or their agents who are the authors [177].

The beys, having a limitless power in the lands of their domination, transmit to each of their officers a power that is equally unlimited. In moments when harmony reigns among them and when they consider themselves equals, there exist, in the city of Cairo alone, more than four hundred persons who arrogate to themselves a boundless power, and who exercise according to their whims what it pleases them to call justice [178].

In the villages and in the sparsely populated towns, a delegate of the bey and a few Janissaries are sufficient to maintain the conquered population in obedience; but in the large cities, these means might not always be sufficient: a few others are therefore established. All men exercising the same profession or plying the same trade are reduced to corporations; they have a chief charged with surveilling the actions or opinions of the members, and with reporting on them to the possessors of the country; foresight is carried so far in this regard that public women and even thieves are formed into corps [179]. The functions of the provost of thieves doubtless consist in watching in a special manner over the security of the dominators' properties.

A means even more effective than the preceding one for maintaining the conquered population in enslavement is adopted: it is the interruption of all communication between the inhabitants of the same place. In every city of any size, there exists at both ends of each street a gate entrusted to the guard of the Janissaries. If some act of violence excites, at some point, the uprising of the multitude, the street gates are instantly closed, and the insurrection does not extend any further; moreover, these gates are closed every evening and open only at daybreak. Each fraction of the subjugated population thus finds itself enclosed in a sort of prison; and if, in the silence and darkness of the night, the tyrants see fit to carry out military executions, they do not have to fear that the victims will save themselves by flight or that they will be rescued [180].

The manner in which justice is administered between private individuals is that which is in use throughout the Turkish empire. There exists in Constantinople a first magistrate who bears the title of qadi el-askar (judge of the army), a fitting title for the magistrate of a nation of conquerors. This grand qadi names the judges of the capital cities, and these in turn name the judges of the cities under their jurisdiction. The functions of judge, like all the others, are given only to those who offer the most money for them, and are never given for more than a year: the qadi must therefore, in the course of this year, recoup his outlays and make all the profits for which he bought his position. One easily sees what must be the effect of these arrangements in men who hold in their hands the scales where subjects come to deposit their goods [181].

The Egyptians having been made brutish, and stripped of their properties by their ancient possessors; having passed, after the ruin of these first masters, under the yoke of the Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman, and Arab armies, one can conceive that an army of barbarians that creates or preserves the use of the means of oppression I have just expounded must encounter little resistance: one can conceive that, although it is composed of only about eight thousand men, it must be easy for it to maintain nearly four million individuals in obedience [182].

If we now consider the population of Egypt as a whole, we will see that, since the most remote times, it has been divided into two fractions: one, that of the conquering peoples whose individuals have in turn occupied all the posts of civil and military power; the other, that of the vanquished people, which has filled all the subordinate classes of society [183]. The oppression that has always been the necessary consequence of such a regime has allowed to subsist among the vanquished only those individuals whose existence was absolutely necessary to keep the victors alive. Egypt has no intermediate class composed of merchants, property owners, or men exercising the professions of doctor, lawyer, or other similar ones. In this country, everyone is military, that is to say, an agent of exploitation, or everyone is an artisan, laborer, or small merchant, that is to say, an exploited population [184]. If there exist in the populous cities a few families who, by their comfortable means, would elsewhere belong to the middle class, they hide their fortune, and seek to blend in, through the appearance of poverty, with the most miserable classes [185].

The Mamluks, in receiving a Turkish pasha, who arrived among them without any apparent force, had believed they would lose none of their power; and, in effect, for a long time, their power seems to have lost nothing. Sultan Selim had confirmed, by his charter, the absolute power of the republic of the beys over the conquered population; he had only obliged them to take, in matters of religion, the advice of the mullah or high priest subject to his authority; and it does not appear that the government of Constantinople ever failed in its commitments by protecting the vanquished population against the oppression of its conquerors. But the mere fact of having admitted among them the agent of a foreign power, and of having recognized the sovereignty of that power, gives the Porte the means to dominate them through one another and to destroy them afterward.

The occupation of the Turks having at first merged with that of the Mamluks and having then replaced it, permit me to recall here the origin of this people and the nature of its government. One will see that the revolution they carried out in Egypt was reduced to a change of persons, but that the system remained more or less the same.

The Turks today have all the physical traits of most of the peoples of Europe. Their ancestors were, however, a race of Tatars; they belonged to those hordes that, from the center of Asia, brought barbarism to the entire world. One tires of researching their origin; their antiquities, according to Voltaire, are hardly more deserving of a continuous history than those of the wolves and tigers of their country. A caliph of the Arabs of the Abbasid dynasty had a troop of five or six hundred of these barbarians brought in for his guard; those called others. They took sides in the quarrels that arose between the Arabs, and ended by subjugating the men who had called or received them. Such is the origin of the Ottoman power that has swallowed everything, from the Euphrates to Greece. This origin was the same as that of the Mamluks.

The Turks have modified their physical constitution by their alliances and by their affiliations: they have always, like the grandees of Persia, drawn most of their women from Georgia or Circassia, and they have taken the elite of them; for a long time also, they demanded from the Greeks a tenth of their children; and these children, raised in the Muslim religion and merged with the conquerors, ended by becoming part of them [186]. But, if they have managed to modify their physical traits, they have changed nothing of their moral character: those who exist today are as ignorant and as ferocious as those who, for the first time, abandoned Tartary.

According to the customs of barbarous peoples, the vanquished is entirely at the discretion of the victor; he becomes his slave; his life, his goods belong to him: the victor is a master who can dispose of everything, who owes nothing, and who grants as a favor all that he leaves.

“Such, in all times,” says Volney, “was the right of the Tatars from whom the Turks draw their origin. It is on these principles that even their social state was formed. In the plains of Tartary, the hordes, divided by interest, were but troops of brigands armed to attack or to defend themselves, to pillage, as booty, all the objects of their avidity.

“Already all the elements of the present state were formed. Ceaselessly wandering and camped, the shepherds were soldiers; the horde was an army: now, in an army, the laws are but the orders of the chiefs; these orders are absolute, suffer no delay; they must be unanimous, issue from a single will, from a single head: hence a supreme authority in the one who commands; hence a passive submission in the one who obeys. But in the transmission of these orders, the instrument becomes an agent in its turn; from this results an imperious and servile spirit, which is precisely that which the conquering Turks brought with them: proud, after the victory, to be one of the members of the victorious people, the last of the Ottomans regarded the first of the vanquished with the pride of a master; this spirit growing from rank to rank, let one judge the distance that the supreme chief must have seen between himself and the crowd of slaves. The sentiment he conceived of it cannot be better painted than by the formula of the titles that the sultans give themselves in public acts.

“I,” they say in the treaties with the king of France, “I who am, by the infinite graces of the great, just, and all-powerful Creator, and by the abundance of the miracles of the chief of his prophets, emperor of the powerful emperors, refuge of sovereigns, distributor of crowns to the kings of the earth, servant of the two sacred cities (Mecca and Medina), governor of the holy city of Jerusalem, master of Europe, of Asia, and of Africa, conquered with our victorious sword and our dreadful lance, lord of the two seas (White and Black), of Damascus odor of paradise, of Baghdad seat of the caliphs, of the fortresses of Belgrade, of Agria, and of a multitude of countries, islands, straits, peoples, generations, and of so many victorious armies that rest near our Sublime Porte; I, finally, who am the shadow of God on earth, etc. [187]”

From the height of so much grandeur, the sultan considers the land he possesses and distributes only as a domain of which he is the absolute master; he considers the peoples he has conquered only as slaves devoted to serving him, and the soldiers he commands, as valets with whom he maintains these slaves in obedience. Volney compares the Turkish empire to a plantation of our sugar islands, where a crowd of slaves work for the luxury of a single great proprietor, under the inspection of a few servants who profit from it; he sees no other difference in it, except that the sultan's domain being too vast for a single management, it was necessary to divide it into sub-plantations, on the model of the first: such are the provinces under the government of the pashas. These provinces still being too vast, the pashas have applied other divisions to them, and hence this hierarchy of functionaries who, from rank to rank, reach the last details.

“In this series of posts,” adds Volney, “the object of the commission always being the same, the means of execution do not change in nature. Thus, power being, in the prime mover, absolute and arbitrary, it is transmitted arbitrary and absolute to all his agents; each of them is the image of his principal; it is always the sultan who commands under the diverse names of pasha, of motsallam, of qaim-maqam, of aga; there is not even a delibash who does not represent him. One must hear with what pride the last of these soldiers, giving orders in a village, pronounces: It is the will of the sultan; it is the good pleasure of the sultan. The reason for this pride is simple; it is that, becoming the bearer of the word and minister of the word of the sultan, he becomes the sultan himself... Doubtless, as the Turks say, the sultan's saber does not descend to the dust; but, this saber, he places it in the hands of his vizier, who gives it to the pasha, from whom it passes to the motsallam, to the aga, and down to the last delibash, so that it finds itself in everyone's hands, and strikes even the vilest heads [188].”

In each government, the pasha representing the sultan, who is the shadow of God on earth, therefore possesses an absolute authority; he unites in his person all powers, with the exception of that which consists in rendering justice in affairs where the government is not concerned; he is head of the military and of finances, and of the police and of criminal justice; he has the power of life and death; he can make peace and war at his pleasure: in a word, his authority has no other limits than the forces at his disposal. The principal object of his mission is to have the tribute paid, that is to say, to pass the revenue to the great proprietor, to that master who has conquered and who possesses the land by the right of his dreadful lance. Whatever the means he employs to arrive at the goal of his mission, he is never asked to account for it; one looks only at the result, that is to say, the payment. The post of pasha being sold, the vizier changes their posting as often as he can, in order to have occasions to renew the sales [189].