/> it was in many parts in open revolt, in all the rest stagnant and slowly

rotting. The thrice-foiled claimant to its succession, who six years

before had denounced the Black Sea clause of the Treaty of Paris and so

freed its hands for offence, was manifestly preparing a fresh assault.

Something drastic must be done; but what?



This danger of the empire's international situation, and also the disgrace

of it, had been evident for some time past to those who had any just

appreciation of affairs; and in the educated class, at any rate, something

like a public opinion, very apprehensive and very much ashamed, had

struggled into being. The discovery of a leader in Midhat Pasha, former

governor-general of Bagdad, and a king-maker of recent notoriety, induced

the party of this opinion to take precipitate action. Murad had been

deposed in August. Before the year was out Midhat presented himself before

Abdul Hamid with a formal demand for the promulgation of a Constitution,

proposing not only to put into execution the pious hopes of the two Hatti

Sherifs of Abdul Mejid but also to limit the sovereign and govern the

empire by representative institutions. The new sultan, hardly settled on

his uneasy throne, could not deny those who had deposed his two

predecessors, and, shrewdly aware that ripe facts would not be long in

getting the better of immature ideas, accepted. A parliament was summoned;

an electorate, with only the haziest notions of what it was about, went

through the form of sending representatives to Constantinople; and the

sittings were inaugurated by a speech from the throne, framed on the most

approved Britannic model, the deputies, it is said, jostling and crowding

the while to sit, as many as possible, on the right, which they understood

was always the side of powers that be.



It is true this extemporized chamber never had a chance. The Russians

crossed the Pruth before it had done much more than verify its powers, and

the thoughts and energies of the Osmanlis were soon occupied with the most

severe and disastrous struggle in which the empire had ever engaged. But

it is equally certain that it could not have turned to account any chance

it might have had. Once more the 'young men in a hurry' had snatched at

the end of an evolution hardly begun, without taking into account the

immaturity of Osmanli society in political education and political

capacity. After suspension during the war, the parliament was dissolved

unregretted, and its creator was tried for his life, and banished. In

failing, however, Midhat left bad to become so much worse that the next

reformers would inevitably have a more convinced public opinion behind

them, and he had virtually destroyed the power of Mahmud's bureaucracy. If

the only immediate effect was the substitution of an unlimited autocracy,

the Osmanli peoples would be able thenceforward to ascribe their

misfortunes to a single person, meditate attack, on a single position, and

dream of realizing some day an ideal which had been definitely formulated.



The Russian onslaught, which began in both Europe and Asia in the spring

of 1877, had been brought on, after a fashion become customary, by

movements in the Slavonic provinces of the Ottoman Empire and in Rumania;

and the latter province, now independent in all but name and, in defiance

of Ottoman protests, disposing of a regular army, joined the invader. In

campaigns lasting a little less than a year, the Osmanli Empire was

brought nearer to passing than ever before, and it was in a suburb of

Constantinople itself that the final armistice was arranged. But action by

rival powers, both before the peace and in the revision of it at Berlin,

gave fresh assurance that the end would not be suffered to come yet; and,

moreover, through the long series of disasters, much latent strength of

the empire and its peoples had been revealed.



When that empire had emerged, shorn of several provinces--in Europe, of

Rumania, Serbia, and northern Greece, with Bulgaria also well on the road

they had travelled to emancipation, and in Asia, of a broad slice of

Caucasia--Abdul Hamid cut his losses, and, under the new guarantee of the

Berlin Treaty, took heart to try his hand at reviving Osmanli power. He

and his advisers had their idea, the contrary of the idea of Midhat and

all the sultans since Mahmud. The empire must be made, not more European,

but more Asiatic. In the development of Islamic spirit to pan-Islamic

unity it would find new strength; and towards this end in the early

eighties, while he was yet comparatively young, with intelligence

unclouded and courage sufficient, Abdul Hamid patiently set himself. In

Asia, naturally sympathetic to autocracy, and the home of the faith of his

fathers, he set on foot a pan-Islamic propaganda. He exalted his caliphate;

he wooed the Arabs, and he plotted with extraneous Moslems against

whatever foreign government they might have to endure.



It cannot be denied that this idea was based on the logic of facts, and,

if it could be realized, promised better than Midhat's for escape from

shameful dependence. Indeed, Abdul Hamid, an autocrat bent on remaining

one, could hardly have acted upon any other. By far the greater part of

the territorial empire remaining to him lay in Asia. The little left in

Europe would obviously soon be reduced to less. The Balkan lands were

waking, or already awake, to a sense of separate nationality, and what

chance did the Osmanli element, less progressive than any, stand in them?

The acceptance of the Ottoman power into the Concert of Europe, though

formally notified to Abdul Mejid, had proved an empty thing. In that

galley there was no place for a sultan except as a dependent or a slave.

As an Asiatic power, however, exerting temporal sway over some eighteen

million bodies and religious influence over many times more souls, the

Osmanli caliph might command a place in the sun.



The result belied these hopes. Abdul Hamid's failure was owed in the main

to facts independent of his personality or statecraft. The expansion of

Islam over an immense geographical area and among peoples living in

incompatible stages of sophistication, under most diverse political and

social conditions, has probably made any universal caliphial authority for

ever impossible. The original idea of the caliphate, like that of the

jehad or holy war of the faithful, presupposed that all Moslems were

under governments of their own creed, and, perhaps, under one government.

Moreover, if such a caliph were ever to be again, an Osmanli sultan would

not be a strong candidate. Apart from the disqualification of his blood,

he being not of the Prophet's tribe nor even an Arab, he is lord of a

state irretrievably compromised in purist eyes (as Wahabis and Senussis

have testified once and again) by its Byzantine heritage of necessary

relations with infidels. Abdul Hamid's predecessors for two centuries or

more had been at no pains to infuse reality into their nominal leadership

of the faithful. To call a real caliphate out of so long abeyance could

hardly have been effected even by a bold soldier, who appealed to the

general imagination of Moslems; and certainly was beyond the power of a

timid civilian.



When Abdul Hamid had played this card and failed, he had no other; and his

natural pusillanimity and shiftiness induced him to withdraw ever more

into the depths of his palace, and there use his intelligence in

exploiting this shameful dependence of his country on foreign powers.

Unable or unwilling to encourage national resistance, he consoled himself,

as a weak malcontent will, by setting one power against another,

pin-pricking the stronger and blustering to the weaker. The history of his

reign is a long record of protests and surrenders to the great in big

matters, as to Great Britain in the matter of Egypt in 1881, to Russia in

that of Eastern Rumelia in 1885, to France on the question of the

Constantinople quays and other claims, and to all the powers in 1881 in

the matter of the financial control. Between times he put in such

pin-pricks as he could, removing his neighbours' landmarks in the Aden

hinterland or the Sinaitic peninsula. He succeeded, however, in keeping

his empire out of a foreign war with any power for about thirty years,

with the single exception of a brief conflict with Greece in 1897. While

in the first half of his reign he was at pains to make no European friend,

in the latter he fell more and more under the influence of Germany, which,

almost from the accession of Kaiser Wilhelm II, began to prepare a

southward way for future use, and alone of the powers, never browbeat the

sultan.



Internally, the empire passed more and more under the government of the

imperial household. Defeated by the sheer geographical difficulty of

controlling directly an area so vast and inadequately equipped with means

of communication, Abdul Hamid soon relaxed the spasmodic efforts of his

early years to better the condition of his subjects; and, uncontrolled and

demoralized by the national disgrace, the administration went from bad to

much worse. Ministers irresponsible; officials without sense of public

obligation; venality in all ranks; universal suspicion and delation;

violent remedies, such as the Armenian massacres of 1894, for diseases due

to neglect; the peasantry, whether Moslem or Christian, but especially

Christian, forced ultimately to liquidate all accounts; impoverishment of

the whole empire by the improvidence and oppression of the central power--

such phrasing of the conventional results of 'Palace' government expresses

inadequately the fruits of Yildiz under Abdul Hamid II.



Pari passu with this disorder of central and provincial administration

increased the foreign encroachments on the empire. The nation saw not only

rapid multiplication of concessions and hypothecations to aliens, and of

alien persons themselves installed in its midst under extra-territorial

immunity from its laws, secured by the capitulations, but also whole

provinces sequestered, administered independently of the sultan's

government, and prepared for eventual alienation. Egypt, Tunisia, Eastern

Rumelia, Krete--these had all been withdrawn from Ottoman control since

the Berlin settlement, and now Macedonia seemed to be going the same way.

Bitter to swallow as the other losses had been--pills thinly sugared with

a guarantee of suzerainty--the loss of Macedonia would be more bitter

still; for, if it were withdrawn from Ottoman use and profit, Albania

would follow and so would the command of the north Aegean and the Adriatic

shores; while an ancient Moslem population would remain at Christian

mercy.



It was partly Ottoman fault, partly the fault of circumstances beyond

Ottoman control, that this district had become a scandal and a reproach.

In the days of Osmanli greatness Macedonia had been neglected in favour of

provinces to the north, which were richer and more nearly related to the

ways into central Europe. When more attention began to be paid to it by

the Government, it had already become a cockpit for the new-born Christian

nationalities, which had been developed on the north, east, and south.

These were using every weapon, material and spiritual, to secure

preponderance in its society, and had created chronic disorder which the

Ottoman administration now weakly encouraged to save itself trouble, now

violently dragooned. Already the powers had not only proposed autonomy for

it, but begun to control its police and its finance. This was the last

straw. The public opinion which had slowly been forming for thirty years

gained the army, and Midhat's seed came to fruit.



By an irony of fate Macedonia not only supplied the spectacle which

exasperated the army to revolt, but by its very disorder made the

preparation of that revolt possible; for it was due to local limitations

of Ottoman sovereignty that the chief promoters of revolution were able to

conspire in safety. By another irony, two of the few progressive measures

ever encouraged by Abdul Hamid contributed to his undoing. If he had not

sent young officers to be trained abroad, the army, the one Ottoman

institution never allowed wholly to decay, would have remained outside the

conspiracy. If he had never promoted the construction of railways, as he

began to do after 1897, the Salonika army could have had no such influence

on affairs in Constantinople as it exerted in 1908 and again in 1909. As

it was, the sultan, at a mandate from Resna in Macedonia, re-enacted

Midhat's Constitution, and, a year later, saw an army from Salonika arrive

to uphold that Constitution against the reaction he had fostered, and to

send him, dethroned and captive, to the place whence itself had come.