The Balkans Part 16

But the provinces, even if quiet (which some of them, e.g. the Lebanon in the early 'forties', were not), proved far from content. If the form of Osmanli government had changed greatly, its spirit had changed little, and defective communications militated against the responsibility of officials to the centre. Money was scarce, and the paper currency--an ill-omened device of Mahmud's--was depreciated, distrusted, and regarded as an imperial betrayal of confidence. Finally, the hostility of Russia, notoriously unabated, and the encouragement of aspiring _rayas_ credited to her and other foreign powers made bad blood between creeds and encouraged opposition to the execution of the pro-Christian Tanzimat. When Christian turbulence at last brought on, in 1854, the Russian attack which developed into the Crimean War, and Christian allies, though they frustrated that attack, made a peace by which the Osmanlis gained nothing, the latter were in no mood to welcome the repet.i.tion of the Tanzimat, which Abdul Mejid consented to embody in the Treaty of Paris. The reign closed amid turbulence and humiliations--ma.s.sacre and bombardment at Jidda, ma.s.sacre and Franco-British coercion in Syria--from all of which the sultan took refuge with women and wine, to meet in 1861 a drunkard's end.

His successor, Abdul Aziz, had much the same intentions, the same civilian sympathies, the same policy of Europeanization, and a different, but more fatal, weakness of character. He was, perhaps, never wholly sane; but his aberration, at first attested only by an exalted conviction of his divine character and inability to do wrong, excited little attention until it began to issue in fantastic expenditure. By an irony of history, he is the one Osmanli sultan upon the roll of our Order of the Garter, the right to place a banner in St, George's Chapel having been offered to this Allah-possessed caliph on the occasion of his visit to the West in 1867.

Despite the good intentions of Abdul Aziz himself--as sincere as can be credited to a disordered brain---and despite more than one minister of outstanding ability, reform and almost everything else in the empire went to the bad in this unhappy reign. The administration settled down to lifeless routine and lapsed into corruption: the national army was starved: the depreciation of the currency grew worse as the revenue declined and the sultan's household and personal extravagance increased. Encouraged by the inertia of the imperial Government, the Christians of the European provinces waxed bold. Though Montenegro was severely handled for contumacy, the Serbs were able to cover their penultimate stage towards freedom by forcing in 1867 the withdrawal of the last Ottoman garrisons from their fortresses. Krete stood at bay for three years and all but won her liberty. Bosnia rose in arms, but divided against herself. Pregnant with graver trouble than these, Bulgaria showed signs of waking from long sleep. In 1870 she obtained recognition as a nationality in the Ottoman Empire, her Church being detached from the control of the Oec.u.menical Patriarch of the Greeks and placed under an Exarch. Presently, her peasantry growing ever more restive, pa.s.sed from protest to revolt against the Circa.s.sian refugee-colonists with whom the Porte was flooding the land. The sultan, in an evil hour, for lack of trained troops, let loose irregulars on the villages, and the Bulgarian atrocities, which they committed in 1875, sowed a fatal harvest for his successor to reap. His own time was almost fulfilled. The following spring a dozen high officials, with the a.s.sent of the Sheikh-ul-Islam and the active dissent of no one, took Abdul Aziz from his throne to a prison, wherein two days later he perished, probably by his own hand. A puppet reigned three months as Murad V, and then, at the bidding of the same king-makers whom his uncle had obeyed, left the throne free for his brother Abdul Hamid, a man of affairs and ability, who was to be the most conspicuous, or rather, the most notorious Osmanli sultan since Suleiman.

6

_Relapse_

The new sultan, who had not expected his throne, found his realm in perilous case. Nominally sovereign and a member of the Concert of Europe, he was in reality a semi-neutralized dependant, existing, as an undischarged bankrupt, on sufferance of the powers. Should the Concert be dissolved, or even divided, and any one of its members be left free to foreclose its Ottoman mortgages, the empire would be at an end. Internally 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 a.s.sault.

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 cla.s.s, 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 Const.i.tution, 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 inst.i.tutions. 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 subst.i.tution 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 pa.s.sing 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 a.s.surance 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 emanc.i.p.ation, 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 leaders.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+ftiness 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-p.r.i.c.king the stronger and bl.u.s.tering 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-p.r.i.c.ks 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 pa.s.sed 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 ma.s.sacres 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 pa.s.su_ 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 sh.o.r.es; while an ancient Moslem population would remain at Christian mercy.

It was partly Ottoman fault, partly the fault of circ.u.mstances 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 c.o.c.kpit 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 inst.i.tution 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 Const.i.tution, and, a year later, saw an army from Salonika arrive to uphold that Const.i.tution against the reaction he had fostered, and to send him, dethroned and captive, to the place whence itself had come.

7

_Revolution_

Looking back on this revolution across seven years of its consequences, we see plainly enough that it was inspired far less by desire for humane progress than by shame of Osmanli military decline. The 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity' programme which its authors put forward (a civilian minority among them, sincerely enough), Europe accepted, and the populace of the empire acted upon for a moment, did not express the motive of the movement or eventually guide its course. The essence of that movement was militant nationalism. The empire was to be regenerated, not by humanizing it but by Ottomanizing it. The Osmanli, the man of the sword, was the type to which all others, who wished to be of the nation, were to conform. Such as did not so wish must be eliminated by the rest.

The revolutionary Committee in Salonika, called 'of Union and Progress', held up its cards at first, but by 1910 events had forced its hand on the table. The definite annexation of Bosnia and Hercegovina by Austria-Hungary in 1908, and the declaration of independence and a.s.sumption of the t.i.tle Tsar by the ruler of Bulgaria, since they were the price to be paid by the revolutionaries for a success largely made in Germany, were opposed officially only _pro forma_; but when uninformed opinion in the empire was exasperated thereby against Christendom, the Committee, to appease reactionaries, had to give premature proof of pan-Osmanli and pro-Moslem intentions by taking drastic action against _rayas_. The Greeks of the empire, never without suspicions, had failed to testify the same enthusiasm for Ottoman fraternity which others, e.g. the Armenians, had shown; now they resumed their separatist att.i.tude, and made it clear that they still aspired, not to Ottoman, but to h.e.l.lenic nationality. Nor were even the Moslems of the empire unanimous for fraternity among themselves. The Arab-speaking societies complained of under-representation in the councils and offices of the state, and made no secret of their intention not to be a.s.similated by the Turk-speaking Osmanlis. To all suggestions, however, of local home-rule and conciliation of particularist societies in the empire, the Committee was deaf. Without union, it believed in no progress, and by union it understood the a.s.similation of all societies in the empire to the Osmanli.

Logic was on the side of the Committee in its choice of both end and means. In pan-Ottomanism, if it could be effected, lay certainly the single chance of restoring Osmanli independence and power to anything like the position they had once held. In rule by a militarist oligarchy for some generations to come, lay the one hope of realizing the pan-Ottoman idea and educating the resultant nation to self-government. That end, however, it was impossible to realize under the circ.u.mstances in which past history had involved the Ottoman Empire. There was too much bad blood between different elements of its society which Osmanli rulers had been labouring for centuries rather to keep apart than to unite; and certain important elements, both Moslem and Christian, had already developed too mature ideas of separate nationality. With all its defects, however, the new order did undoubtedly rest on a wider basis than the old, and its organization was better conceived and executed. It retained some of the sympathy of Europe which its beginnings had excited, and the western powers, regarding its representative inst.i.tutions as earnests of good government, however ill they might work at the first, were disposed to give it every chance.

Unfortunately the Young Turks were in a hurry to bring on their millennium, and careless of certain neighbouring powers, not formidable individually but to be reckoned with if united, to whom the prospect of regenerated Osmanlis a.s.similating their nationals could not be welcome.

Had the Young Turks been content to put their policy of Ottomanization in the background for awhile, had they made no more than a show of accepting local distinctions of creed and politics, keeping in the meantime a tight rein on the Old Turks, they might long have avoided the union of those neighbours, and been in a better position to resist, should that union eventually be arrayed against themselves.

But a considerable and energetic element among them belonged to the nervous Levantine type of Osmanli, which is as little minded to compromise as any Old Turk, though from a different motive. It elected to deal drastically and at once with Macedonia, the peculiar object not only of European solicitude but also of the interest of Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece. If ever a province required delicate handling it was this. It did not get it. The interested neighbours, each beset by fugitives of its oppressed nationals, protested only to be ignored or browbeaten. They drew towards one another; old feuds and jealousies were put on one side; and at last, in the summer of 1912, a Holy League of Balkan States, inspired by Venezelos, the new Kretan Prime Minister of Greece, and by Ferdinand of Bulgaria, was formed with a view to common action against the oppressor of Greek, Serbian, and Bulgarian nationals in Macedonia. Montenegro, always spoiling for a fight, was deputed to fire the train, and at the approach of autumn the first Balkan war blazed up.

8

_Balkan War_

The course of the struggle is described elsewhere in this volume. Its event ill.u.s.trates the danger of an alliance succeeding beyond the expectations in which it was formed. The const.i.tuent powers had looked for a stiff struggle with the Ottoman armies, but for final success sufficient to enable them, at the best, to divide Macedonia among themselves, at the worst, to secure its autonomy under international guarantee. Neither they nor any one else expected such an Ottoman collapse as was in store. Their moment of attack was better chosen than they knew. The Osmanli War Office was caught fairly in the middle of the stream. Fighting during the revolution, subsequently against Albanians and other recalcitrant provincials, and latterly against the Italians, who had s.n.a.t.c.hed at Tripoli the year before, had reduced the _Nizam_, the first line of troops, far below strength. The _Redif_, the second line, had received hardly more training, thanks to the disorganization of Abdul Hamid's last years and of the first years of the new order, than the _Mustafuz_, the third and last line. Armament, auxiliary services, and the like had been disorganized preparatory to a scheme for thorough reorganization, which had been carried, as yet, but a very little way. A foreign (German) element, introduced into the command, had had time to impair the old spirit of Ottoman soldiers, but not to create a new one. The armies sent against the Bulgarians in Thrace were so many mobs of various arms; those which met the Serbs, a little better; those which opposed the Greeks, a little worse.

It followed that the Bulgarians, who had proposed to do no more in Thrace than block Adrianople and immobilize the Constantinople forces, were carried by their own momentum right down to Chataldja, and there and at Adrianople had to prosecute siege operations when they ought to have been marching to Kavala and Salonika. The Serbs, after hard fighting, broke through not only into Macedonia but into Albania, and reached the Adriatic, but warned off this by the powers, consoled themselves with the occupation of much more Macedonian territory than the concerted plans of the allies had foreseen. The Greeks, instead of hard contests for the Haliacmon Valley and Epirus--their proper Irredenta--pushed such weak forces before them that they got through to Salonika just in time to forestall a Bulgarian column. Ottoman collapse was complete everywhere, except on the Chataldja front. It remained to divide the spoil. Serbia might not have Adriatic Albania, and therefore wanted as much Macedonia as she had actually overrun. Greece wanted the rest of Macedonia and had virtually got it. Remained Bulgaria who, with more of Thrace than she wanted, found herself almost entirely crowded out of Macedonia, the common objective of all.

Faced with division _ex post facto_, the allies found their _a priori_ agreement would not resolve the situation. Bulgaria, the predominant partner and the most aggrieved, would neither recognize the others' rights of possession nor honestly submit her claims to the only possible arbiter, the Tsar of Russia. Finding herself one against two, she tried a _coup de main_ on both fronts, failed, and brought on a second Balkan war, in which a new determining factor, Rumania, intervened at a critical moment to decide the issue against her. The Ottoman armies recovered nearly all they had lost in eastern and central Thrace, including Adrianople, almost without firing a shot, and were not ill pleased to be quit of a desperate situation at the price of Macedonia, Albania, and western Thrace.

Defeated and impoverished, the Ottoman power came out of the war clinging to a mere remnant of its European empire--one single mutilated province which did not pay its way. With the lost territories had gone about one-eighth of the whole population and one-tenth of the total imperial revenue. But when these heavy losses had been cut, there was nothing more of a serious nature to put to debit, but a little even to credit. Ottoman prestige had suffered but slightly in the eyes of the people. The obstinate and successful defence of the Chataldja lines and the subsequent recovery of eastern Thrace with Adrianople, the first European seat of the Osmanlis, had almost effaced the sense of Osmanli disgrace, and stood to the general credit of the Committee and the individual credit of its military leader, Enver Bey. The loss of some thousands of soldiers and much material was compensated by an invaluable lesson in the faultiness of the military system, and especially the _Redif_ organization. The way was now clearer than before for re-making the army on the best European model, the German. The campaign had not been long, nor, as wars go, costly to wage. In the peace Turkey gained a new lease of life from the powers, and, profligate that she was, the promise of more millions of foreign money.

Over and above all this an advantage, which she rated above international guarantees, was secured to her--the prospective support of the strongest military power in Europe. The success of Serbia so menaced Germano-Austrian plans for the penetration of the Balkans, that the Central Powers were bound to woo Turkey even more lavishly than before, and to seek alliance where they had been content with influence. In a strong Turkey resided all their hope of saving from the Slavs the way to the Mediterranean. They had kept this policy in view for more than twenty years, and in a hundred ways, by introduction of Germans into the military organization, promotion of German financial enterprise, pus.h.i.+ng of German commerce, pressure on behalf of German concessions which would entail provincial influence (for example, the construction of a transcontinental railway in Asia), those powers had been manifesting their interest in Turkey with ever-increasing solicitude. Now they must attach her to themselves with hoops of steel and, with her help, as soon as might be, try to recast the Balkan situation.

The experience of the recent war and the prospect in the future made continuance and accentuation of military government in the Ottoman Empire inevitable. The Committee, which had made its way back to power by violent methods, now suppressed its own Const.i.tution almost as completely as Abdul Hamid had suppressed Midhat's parliament. Re-organization of the military personnel, acc.u.mulation of war material, strengthening of defences, provision of a.r.s.enals, dockyards, and s.h.i.+ps, together with devices for obtaining money to pay for all these things, make Ottoman history for the years 1912-14. The bond with Germany was drawn lighter. More German instructors were invited, more German engineers commissioned, more munitions of war paid for in French gold. By 1914 it had become so evident that the Osmanlis must array themselves with Austro-Germany in any European war, that one wonders why a moment's credit was ever given to their protestations of neutrality when that war came at last in August 1914. Turkey then needed other three months to complete her first line of defences and mobilize. These were allowed to her, and in the late autumn she entered the field against Great Britain, France, and Russia, armed with German guns, led by German officers, and fed with German gold.

9

_The Future_

Turkey's situation, therefore, in general terms has become this. With the dissolution of the Concert of Europe the Ottoman Empire has lost what had been for a century its chief security for continued existence. Its fate now depends on that of two European powers which are at war with the rest of the former Concert. Among the last named are Turkey's two princ.i.p.al creditors, holding together about seventy-five per cent. of her public debt. In the event of the defeat of her friends, these creditors will be free to foreclose, the debtor being certainly in no position to meet her obligations. Allied with Christian powers, the Osmanli caliph has proved no more able than his predecessors to unite Islam in his defence; but, for what his t.i.tle is worth, Mohammed V is still caliph, no rival claim having been put forward. The loyalty of the empire remains where it was, pending victory or defeat, the provinces being slow to realize, and still slower to resent, the disastrous economic state to which the war is reducing them.

The present struggle may leave the Osmanli Empire in one of three situations: (1) member of a victorious alliance, reinforced, enlarged, and lightened of financial burdens, as the wages of its sin; (2) member of a defeated alliance, bound to pay the price of blood in loss of territory, or independence, or even existence; (3) party to a compromise under which its territorial empire might conceivably remain Ottoman, but under even stricter European tutelage than of old.

The first alternative it would be idle to discuss, for the result of conditions so novel are impossible to foresee. Nor, indeed, when immediate events are so doubtful an at the present moment, is it profitable to attempt to forecast the ultimate result of any of the alternatives.

Should, however, either the second or the third become fact, certain general truths about the Osmanlis will govern the consequences; and these must be borne in mind by any in whose hands the disposal of the empire may lie.

The influence of the Osmanlis in their empire to-day resides in three things: first, in their possession of Constantinople; second, in the sultan's caliphate and his guardians.h.i.+p of the holy cities of Islam; third, in certain qualities of Osmanli character, notably 'will to power'

and courage in the field.