pickpockets, and guides who offer their services! The steamers all the while are shrieking and pouring forth their clouds of darkest and dirtiest smoke, the old bridge shakes and groans under the clatter of carriages and horses. Each passenger pays a halfpenny, each carriage fivepence, and the money taken amounts every day to four hundred pounds Turkish, a Turkish pound being eighteen shillings. Constantinople is indeed a heart throbbing with life, and by no means the effete town, the deserted Byzantium, of medieval history. It is one of the fairest spots on earth, half Eastern and half Western, the best international market that could be desired. The Turks Turks may well be proud of it, and must not be surprised that their neighbours look upon it as a Naboth's vineyard. Whatever may have been said of the "Sick Man," there is many a sign that the Turk has recovered, and that he will prove a tough morsel to whomever wishes to swallow him. The pure Turk is strong and steady, and determined to fight to the bitter end before he surrenders what for over four hundred years he has called his own. It is difficult to know the Turks, and to discover either their strong or their weak points. They are not very expansive or communicative with strangers, and their domestic life is of course altogether withdrawn from our view. Yet even in the streets one cannot but feel struck with their dignified behaviour. One sees how even the poorest are fond of children, charitable to beggars, and compassionate to animals. In no town would dogs be treated with so much forbearance as they are in the streets of Constantinople. Nor are the dogs so troublesome or fierce as they have generally been represented by casual travellers. They have divided the town among themselves, each set of five or ten or twenty dogs looking upon a certain street or portion of a street as their own. Woe to the strange dog that intrudes into their sacred precincts. As in ancient Rome, every stranger is an enemy, and is treated by them as such. But in other respects the street dogs are perfectly peaceful, most grateful for a bone or any other kindness shown to them. Whatever may have been said to the contrary, they know how to wag their tails like any other dog, whenever they have occasion to express their gratitude to human beings. They are evidently fatalists, like the Turks; they hardly move when carriages roll by, and if they must be driven over, they submit, though not without a piteous howl. The coachmen, though they drive recklessly, will do their best to let sleeping dogs lie, and drive aside so as to avoid hurting them and their hopeful families. The streets are very

badly paved, and what with tramways, carriages, and porters, one's progress is not always very easy or very quick. There is much shouting, and the common people speak very loud, but there are few brawls in the streets, and, what should never be forgotten, there are no drunken men or drunken women to be seen anywhere, or if there is one, we may be sure that he is not a Turk. What that means can best be understood if we remember that with us nearly every brawl, nay, nearly every crime, can be traced back to drunkenness. An English Bishop once declared that he would rather see England free than sober. The Turks are sober, and yet they are free, if reports are true of the freedom with which some of the upper classes indulge in champagne and even stronger intoxicating beverages. The upper classes in Turkey as elsewhere form the exception. The people at large must be judged by the middle and lower classes, and not by the so-called aristocracy. The middle and lower classes, the real backbone of a nation, are as yet free from the vice of drunkenness. They are sober by their own free choice and from respect for their Prophet.

There is another feature of the streets of Constantinople that cannot but strike the European traveller, the absence of open vice, at all events, in the case of Turkish women.

There are plenty of beggars, particularly on the Galata bridge. Some are decidedly hideous and repulsive. Occasionally the police make a raid, and they vanish for a time, but in the end they return to their former haunts.

It is pleasant to see crowds of children, both girls and boys, going to school, as in England. The schools are public and elementary. Most of them owe their origin to the initiative of the reigning Sultan, who is sowing seed of which others will reap the harvest.

There is always something new and interesting to see in the streets for anyone who has eyes to see-money-changers, jugglers, gipsies, sellers of sweetmeats and cakes, dancing bears, funerals, donkey boys, black eunuchs, and white lepers. Whenever we see houses guarded by latticed windows, we know that they are inhabited by Turks. Now and then one can catch a glimpse of what is going on inside, particularly in the Selamlik, or the rooms occupied by the men. Of the ladies behind the lattice-work one can only say-Ut spectent veniunt, but seldom, if ever, Veniunt spectentur ut ipsæ.

(To be continued.)

F. MAX MÜLLER.

THE INDICTMENT OF DIVES.

DO not suppose that those who first heard the parable of Dives and

I Lazarus thought the position of the beggar monstrous or even

abnormal. "Paucis humanum vivit genus," was the true account of that antique world. How could it be otherwise in a social order based upon slavery? The well-nigh two thousand years which have passed away since the parable was spoken have witnessed the evolution of a new idea of human personality. Its essential dignity, its inalienable rights, have been increasingly recognised as the centuries have rolled on. Aristotle's definition of the free man is: "One who belongs to himself, and not to another." It is now recognised by the foremost peoples of the world, and the leaders of the rest, that such freedom is man's sacred birthright, and that in virtue of it he should never be used merely as a means, but must always be an end unto himself. This view of human nature is fatal to slavery. And as it has prevailed, slavery has disappeared. But is the right to personal freedom the only aboriginal prerogative of man ? The framers of the famous Declaration which announced to the world the French Revolution as an accomplished fact thought not Security and resistance to oppression," they proclaimed, were also his natural and imprescriptible rights. I do not propose here to discuss what value rightly attaches to this formula, or to the proposition which precedes it, that men are born and continue equal in rights. This is certain whatever the extravagancies, the sophistries, the blunders, the ignorances and negligences, the crimes and atrocities of the Revolutionary legislators, they vindicated, as none before them had vindicated, the august verity that man, as man, has aboriginal rights. This was their message to the human race, and, as Mr. Mill has well observed, it wrought a great change in man himself. It fell upon the ears of Lazarus, and set him thinking about his own condition. Was it in accordance with his rights, he began to ask himself, that he should lie at the gate in rags scantily covering his sores, vainly desiring even the crumbs which fell from the well-spread table of Dives?

It was the beginning of the movement called Socialism. No doubt we may, in some sense, trace the movement, like the great Revolution itself, to Rousseau; his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality contains the germ of it. But its first set exponent appears to have been the Abbé Fauchet, who in the early days of the Revolution delivered orations at a club called the "Cercle Social," and edited a journal entitled La Bouche de Fer. He insisted "that all the world ought to live; that everybody should have something and nobody too much," and denounced "the wretch who desires the continuance of the present infernal régime, where you may count outcasts by millions, and by dozens the upstarts (les insolents) who possess everything without having done anything for it." The guillotine cut short the Abbé's eloquence in 1793-he appears to have been suspected of Girondism-but others carried on his work. Thus Marat pleaded in the Ami du Peuple: "Either stifle the workpeople, or feed them. But how find work for them? Find it any way you like. How pay them? With the salary of M. Bailly." Bailly, it will be remembered, was the patriot mayor who floridly harangued poor Louis XVI. at the barrier of Passy, congratulating the wretched monarch upon being " conquered by his people," and was himself put to death three years afterwards by the same "people," with circumstances of revolting cruelty. Chaumette, too, praised by Mr. John Morley as showing "the natural effect of abandoning belief in another life by his energetic interest for improving the lot of men in this life," urged that, though "we have destroyed the nobles and the Capets, there is another aristocracy to be overthrown-the aristocracy of the rich." The poor had the same gospel preached unto them by Tallien, who demanded "full and entire equality," and insisted that "the owners of property should be sent to the dungeons as public thieves"; by Fouché, afterwards Duke of Otranto and Police Minister to the First Napoleon, who maintained that "equality ought not to be a deceitful illusion; that "all citizens ought to have a like right to the advantages of society"; and by Joseph Babeuf, who sought to realise his doctrines by a conspiracy, and was executed for his pains by the Directory, and who changed his Christian name to Caius Gracchus: "Pourquoi vouloir me forcer à conserver St. Joseph pour mon patron?" he explained. "Je ne veux pas les vertus de ce brave homme-là." But perhaps the most memorable of these Revolutionary Socialists was Brissot de Warville, for it is to him that we owe the famous formula about property and theft which everyone now knows. "La propriété exclusive c'est le vol," was the original text of the

dictum which for sixty years lay buried and forgotten in Brissot's not very meritorious work, Recherches Philosophiques sur la Propriété et sur le Vol. Then Prudhon discovered it and made it current coin in the shortened form, "La propriété c'est le vol," appropriating it, however, without acknowledgment; perhaps, M. Janet conjectures,* in virtue of the natural right, alleged by Brissot, of everybody to everything.

This is the corner-stone, precious elect, upon which all Socialism rests. Doubtless, as Professor Luigi Cossa observes, there is an ambiguity about the word which is puzzling, since the "party of Socialism, so called, includes a rather heterogeneous number of groups, which are named according to the aims they have in view, the means they propose to use, and the manner in which they hold together." No doubt, too, the Professor is well warranted in his complaint that "classification has a hard road to travel when it enters the tangle of jarring socialistic sects." The literature of the subject is immense, and is rapidly growing every day. Herr Stamhammer, in his Bibliographie des Socialismus, enumerates some five thousand works more or less immediately dealing with it, and the catalogue is by no means complete. But whatever diversities of operation these volumes present, in all worketh one and the self-same spirit. All bring the same charge, substantially, against Dives-that he is a thief; that is the head and front of his offending; their first count in the indictment against him. "Property is theft." Is this true?

We must distinguish. It certainly is not true of private property in the abstract. The philosophical justification of private property is that it is necessary for the explication of personality in this work-a-day world. A desire to appropriate things external to us, to convert them into lasting instruments of our will, is one of the elements of our nature. We cannot picture to ourselves a state of existence in which man does not exclusively possess things needful for self-preservation. The ultimate ground of private property is necessity arising from the reason of things. Man alone of all animals is a person, self-conscious, self-determined, morally responsible. And the word person denotes the individual as capable of rights (rechtsfähig). We cannot, in strictness, predicate rights of the lower animals, because they are not persons; although we may attribute to them quasi rights in proportion as they approximate to personality. They are not an end to themselves. Man

See his Les Origines du Socialisme Contemporain, which I have before me as I write.