Commercial morals, especially, are bad.  There is no gainsaying that.  Greek, Turkish and Armenian morals consist only in attending church regularly on the appointed Sabbaths, and in breaking the ten commandments all the balance of the week.  It comes natural to them to lie and cheat in the first place, and then they go on and improve on nature until they arrive at perfection.  In recommending his son to a merchant as a valuable salesman, a father does not say he is a nice, moral, upright boy, and goes to Sunday School and is honest, but he says, “This boy is worth his weight in broad pieces of a hundred—­for behold, he will cheat whomsoever hath dealings with him, and from the Euxine to the waters of Marmora there abideth not so gifted a liar!” How is that for a recommendation?  The Missionaries tell me that they hear encomiums like that passed upon people every day.  They say of a person they admire, “Ah, he is a charming swindler, and a most exquisite liar!”

Every body lies and cheats—­every body who is in business, at any rate.  Even foreigners soon have to come down to the custom of the country, and they do not buy and sell long in Constantinople till they lie and cheat like a Greek.  I say like a Greek, because the Greeks are called the worst transgressors in this line.  Several Americans long resident in Constantinople contend that most Turks are pretty trustworthy, but few claim that the Greeks have any virtues that a man can discover—­at least without a fire assay.

I am half willing to believe that the celebrated dogs of Constantinople have been misrepresented—­slandered.  I have always been led to suppose that they were so thick in the streets that they blocked the way; that they moved about in organized companies, platoons and regiments, and took what they wanted by determined and ferocious assault; and that at night they drowned all other sounds with their terrible howlings.  The dogs I see here can not be those I have read of.

I find them every where, but not in strong force.  The most I have found together has been about ten or twenty.  And night or day a fair proportion of them were sound asleep.  Those that were not asleep always looked as if they wanted to be.  I never saw such utterly wretched, starving, sad-visaged, broken-hearted looking curs in my life.  It seemed a grim satire to accuse such brutes as these of taking things by force of arms.  They hardly seemed to have strength enough or ambition enough to walk across the street—­I do not know that I have seen one walk that far yet.  They are mangy and bruised and mutilated, and often you see one with the hair singed off him in such wide and well defined tracts that he looks like a map of the new Territories.  They are the sorriest beasts that breathe—­the most abject—­the most pitiful.  In their faces is a settled expression of melancholy, an air of hopeless despondency.  The hairless patches on a scalded dog are preferred by the fleas of Constantinople