The Sick Man of the East
By Editor
The "Sick Man of the East" has been a long time dying, but there are of late fresh signs of the inevitable, though long-delayed dissolution, and with it the collapse of that false religious system upon which the Ottoman empire has rested. Murder and crime in the palace, riot and anarchy among the people, in the imperial city, and misrule and misery everywhere within the Turkish empire, are among the signs of rapid disorganization. An observing correspondent of the New York Tribune writing from Constantinople, says, "One cannot prognosticate the rate of dissolution in a mass that is already jelly-like in respect to consistency. But it is safe to say that fifty years have not seen such languor, such flabbiness of body and mind, as has befallen the Turkish body politic since Tel-el-Kebir and its destruction of the Pan-Islamic idea. * The destroying forces at work in Turkey become more and more evident every day, and the fact that this ancient empire has close before it new disasters, becomes more certain."—Lever.