'The Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society. From December 1854 to March 1856. (New Issue.) Edited by the Secretary. Volume XII.' [‎66] (177/258)

66
COMMANDER F. JONES S
stantinople. For the more distant provinces this law should be modified,
so that retributive justice should immediately folloAv the commission of
crime. I will not deny but that long incarceration may be worse than death
to the offender, but such a mode of punishment is lost in these countries
where example and precept are understood only through the channel of the
eye. Here we might as well imprison a mule to deter others from kicking.
The public mind is not yet enlightened enough to understand the motives,
for the penal refinements of our European Codes.
The custom duties of Baghdad have been on the decline for many years,
owing to various causes, the chief of which is the opening of the northern
roads for the entrance of Russian and English manufactured goods into Persia
and Asia Minor by Syria and the Black Sea. Of late too, the inconveniences
and exactions which the Persian pilgrims experienced from the Turkish offi
cials when visiting the sacred shrines in the neighbourhood of Baghdad, led to
a law being passed in Persia prohibiting the pilgrimage. This journey com
bined the advantages deriveable from its sacred character and from the profits
of commerce, for each individual became either a trader, or a pedlar, according
to his means. Persian money thus flowed into Baghdad in a continued stream,
and gave impetus to trade. This channel, exhausted by the Shah’s order and
disorders in the Pashalik itself, further impeded the exertions of its merchants.
Under Reshid Pasha’s government, however, commerce is again slowly reviv
ing, and the road for devotees having been opened again recently by express
permission of the Shah, we may yet see its bazaars in activity and its revenues
increased ; besides, in a political view, the renewal of the pilgrimage admits
of a favorable construction being placed upon the dictates of the Shah.
The closing of the northern roads into Persia and Asia Minor, conse
quent upon the war now enacting i i the territories around Mount Ararat and
Kars should be, fora time at uast, advantageous to Baghdad. The de
mands for goods from Persia and Anatolia Peninsula that forms most of modern-day Turkey. must fall chiefly upon the three
commercial entrepots, Aleppo, Baghdad, and Bushire, and central as Baghdad
is with a fine water carriage by the Tigris, it offers the most ready market
for the supply. The duties levied are upon the whole in favour of the en
terprising European. They have been arranged by tariffs and special trea
ties, which the authorities at Baghdad and Basreh have always respected.
These duties are under five per cent on an average, and amount to three per
cent only when the goods are merely in course of transit to other places.
Exports are charged from nine to twelve per cent. They consist chiefly
of buffalo hides, tallow, salt, dates, wheat, barley, wood, horses, gums and
galls, the produce of the mountains of Kurdistan. I wish that I could add
to this list an article of native export manufacture, but I cannot remember,
while writing, a single one. Those whom we meet here and in Asia Minor