Page:Eothen, or, Traces of travel brought home from the East by Kinglake, Alexander William.djvu/44

 labor has never taken place, and every man is his own advocate. The importance of the rhetorical art is immense, for a bad speech may endanger the property of the speaker, as well as the soles of his feet, and the free enjoyment of his throat. So it results that most of the Turks whom one sees, have a lawyer-like habit of speaking connectedly, and at length. The treaties continually going on in the bazaar for the buying and selling of the merest trifles, are carried on by speechifying, rather than by mere colloquies, and the eternal uncertainty as to the market value o! things in constant sale, gives room for endless discussion. The seller is for ever demanding a price immensely beyond that for which he sells at last, and so occasions unspeakable disgust to many Englishmen, who cannot see why an honest dealer should ask more for his goods than he will really take:—the truth is, however, that an ordinary tradesman of Constantinople has no other way of finding out the fair market value of his property. The difficulty under which he labors is easily shown by comparing the mechanism of the commercial system in Turkey, with that of our own country. In England, or in any other great mercantile country, the bulk of the things which are bought and sold, goes through the hands of a wholesale dealer, and it is he who higgles and bargains with an entire nation of purchasers, by entering into treaty with retail sellers. The labor of making a few large contracts is sufficient to give a clue for finding the fair market value of the things sold throughout the country; but in Turkey, from the primitive habits of the people, and partly from the absence of great capital, and great credit, the importing merchant, the warehouseman, the wholesale dealer, the retail dealer, and the shopman, are all one person. Old Moostapha, or Abdallah, or Hadgi Mohamed, waddles up from the water's edge with a small packet of merchandize, which he has bought out of a Greek brigantine, and when at last he has reached his nook in the bazaar, he puts his goods before the counter, and himself upon it—then laying fire to his tchibouque he "sits in permanence," and patiently waits to obtain "the best price that can be got in an open market." This is his fair right as a seller, but he has no means of finding out what that best price is, except by actual experiment. He cannot know the intensity of