princes.  It is probably rather as a consequence of this than as its reason that it is the most conservative of schools, conservative in the true sense of leaving things exactly as they are.  The Turkish Ulema have always insisted strongly on the dogma that the ijtahad, that is to say the elaboration of new doctrine, is absolutely closed; that nothing can be added to or taken away from the already existing body of religious law, and that no new mujtahed, or doctor of Islam, can be expected who shall adapt that law to the life of the modern world.  At the same time, while obstinate in matters of opinion, Hanefism has become extremely lax as to practice.  Its moral teaching is held, and I believe justly, to be adapted only too closely to the taste of its chief supporters.  It is accused by its enemies of having given the sanction of its toleration to the moral disorders common among the Turks, their use of fermented drinks, their immoderate concubinage and other worse vices.  It is, in fact, the official school of Ottoman orthodoxy.  It embraces most of those who at the present day support the revived spiritual pretensions of Constantinople.

The pilgrimage then described in our table as Ottoman is mostly made up of men of this theological school.  It must not, however, be supposed that anything like the whole number either of the 8500 pilgrims, or of the 22,000,000 population they represent, is composed of Turks.  The true Ottoman Turk is probably now among the rarest of visitors to Mecca, and it is doubtful whether the whole Turkish census in Europe and in Asia amounts to more than four millions.  With regard to the pilgrimage there is good reason why this should be the case.  In Turkey, all the able-bodied young men, who are the first material of the Haj, are taken from other duties for military service, and hardly any now make their tour of the Kaaba except in the Sultan’s uniform.  Rich merchants, the second material of the Haj in other lands, are almost unknown among the Turks; and the officials, the only well-to-do class in the empire, have neither leisure nor inclination to absent themselves from their worldly business of intrigue.

Besides, the official Turk is already too civilized to put up readily with the real hardships of the Haj.  In spite of the alleviations effected by the steam navigation of the Red Sea, pilgrimage is still no small matter, and once landed at Jeddah, all things are much as they were a hundred years ago, while the Turk has changed.  With his modern notion of dress and comfort he may indeed be excused for shrinking from the quaint nakedness of the pilgrim garb and the bare-headed march to Arafat under a tropical sun.  Besides, there is the land journey still of three hundred miles to make before he can reach Medina, and what to some would be worse hardship, a wearisome waiting afterwards in the unhealthy ports of Hejaz.  The Turkish official, too, has learned to dispense with so many of the forms of his religion that he finds no difficulty in making himself excuses here.  In fact, he seldom or never now performs the pilgrimage.