360 COFFEE. 



are not pretty, and their costumes are ungraceful and enhance 

 their natural ugliness. One looks in vain for the famed Circas- 

 sian beauties, and Turkish society, so far as it is visible to the casual 

 visitor to Constantinople, leaves anything but a favorable impres- 

 sion. The Turks, as a nation, are licentious, fanatical, cruel, and 

 ignorant, and in my estimation, compare very unfavorably with 

 any other nation pretending to civilization. How ignorant they 

 are, may be inferred from an article in their new Constitution, 

 recently promulgated, which, in providing for a legislative body, 

 or House of Congress, specifies that in order to be eligible to 

 membership, a Turk " must be able to read, and for a re-election 

 must be able to read, and so far as possible, to write." 



GEEECE AND HEK CUEEANT CEOP. 



From Constantinople I went to Greece, with the double pur- 

 pose of seeing the interesting antiquities of that country and in- 

 vestigating some matters connected with the trade in cuirants. I 

 cannot say that the Isles of Greece, as they appear to the modern 

 eye, fulfil the high expectations which one is apt to form from all 

 that has been written about them in song and story ; nor do the 

 modem Greeks look very much as if they had descended from the 

 heroes of Thermopylae or those who fought with Marco Bozzaris. 

 It is said, however, that the depressed condition of Greece to-day 

 is due largely to the misrule of Turkey and the terrible struggles 

 which the Greeks have had with that cruel and barbarous nation 

 in the effort to obtain their independence. I was informed by an 

 intelligent Greek gentleman that since the beginning of this cen- 

 tury more than half a million of Greeks, the flower of Grecian 

 manhood, had fallen in these struggles, besides large numbers of 

 non-combatants who had been put to the sword by their cruel and 

 bar'barous opponents, who for many years crushed the Greeks by 

 mere force of numbers, and perpetrated, when victorious, barbari- 

 ties similar to those which have been recently enacted in Bulgaria, 

 which have excited the indignation of the civilized world. More 



