in slippers, not in shoes; in a dressing-gown, not in a dress-coat. The ways which we think duties they think worries, — at once evidences of unrest, and needless obligations imposed on life to make it tiresome. When observances are imposed by religion, that is another matter; but except by religion or superior power, the will ought to be unrestrained. They feel that life under a routine of duties, obligations, observances, is life only to be endured under coercion, is life needlessly made miserable. Or rather, to use an illustration many of our readers will understand better, they feel the European scheme of life as men who are by nature idle, or who have always been masters of their own time, feel monotonous daily work, as if that alone by itself took the sweetness out of life. They do not, for example, want servants, as Englishmen do, invisibly working the household machine, and keeping everything to-day as it was yesterday, but want personal attendants, always visible, always at hand, always saving them from minute trouble and effort. The feeling is not exactly indolence, though it looks so like it, and though it has, in the course of ages passed in climates where exertion is also effort, become mixed up with it; but rather, as Vefyk Pasha says, a form of the liking for liberty, or the desire for the gratification in details of the strong self-will which gives to all Asiatics without exception some characteristics of spoiled children. They do not want to dine out when they are asked, but to dine out when they wish, and the mere notion that if they dine out and have the whim to be silent they may not be silent, is fatiguing. Life, to be delightful, must be always afternoon, and afternoon in holiday. Unfortunately for themselves, Asiatics carry this spirit, which, if confined to social arrangements, might produce nothing worse than simplicity, into serious life, and apart altogether from bad morale, which we are not now discussing, allow a defect of temperament to ruin administration. They will not, under any provocation, burden themselves with a sustained habit of taking trouble. You might as well ask lazzaroni to behave like Prussian Beamten. They issue orders, and punish terribly if they are not obeyed, but that is their only notion of securing obedience. As to "hunting the order down" to its execution, they would not accept life at the price of such a duty. Nothing can be funnier than a contrast which happens to be drawn in this book between Thiers's idea on this matter and Vefyk Pasha's. We have given the Turk's, here is the Frenchman's: —
- I used constantly to find my orders forgotten, or neglected, or misinterpreted. As I have often said to you, men are naturally idle, false, and timid; menteurs, lâches, paresseux. Whenever I found that an employé supposed that because an order had been given, it had been executed, or that because he had been told a thing, it was true, I gave him up as an imbecile. Bonaparte nearly lost the battle of Marengo by supposing that the Austrians had no bridge over the Bormida. Three generals assured him that they had carefully examined the river, and that there was none. It turned out that there were two, and our army was surprised. When I was preparing for war in 1840, I sat every day for eight hours with the ministers of war, of marine, and of the interior. I always began by ascertaining the state of execution of our previous determinations. I never trusted to any assurances, if better evidence could be produced. If I was told that letters had been despatched, I required a certificate from the clerk who had posted them or delivered them to the courier. If answers had been received, I required their production. I punished inexorably every negligence, and even every delay. I kept my colleagues and my bureaux at work all day, and almost all night. We were all of us half-killed. Such a tension of mind wearies more than the hardest bodily work. At night my servants undressed me, took me by the feet and shoulders and placed me in my bed, and I lay there like a corpse till the morning. Even my dreams, when I dreamt, were administrative.
No Asiatic not an exceptional man will do that, yet in Asia it is five times as necessary as in Europe, because the subordinates, besides the regular desire not to work over-much, of which Thiers complained, feel the overwhelming desire for that which Vefyk Pasha called "liberty," — a life not burdened with peremptory but "trifling" duties. They want to be "gentlemen," as the poor often understand the word, — that is, men released from imperative necessities. One-half the weakness of every Oriental government — we do not mean one-half the oppression, that has a different origin — arises from the impossibility of finding men who will act as Thiers did, or of supplying the absence of the lacking spirit either by regulations or by punishments. An Oriental household can be well ordered in its way, but as to making it a machine as perfect as a regiment, and self-acting as many European households are, it cannot be done. No punishment and no reward will make a race in which this spirit is inborn, or into which it has entered, exact, punctual, or prompt. The Southern slaveholders
