Crescent and Iron Cross | Page 5

lingered and made music in Abdul Hamid's brain. He said it over to himself and dwelt upon it, and meditated on the nature and possibilities of massacre. The troubles which massacre had calmed had arisen before his accession out of the establishment of the Bulgarian Exarchate, which corresponded to the Greek Patriarchate, and was given power over districts and peoples whom the Greeks justly considered to belong to them by blood and religion. Greek armed bands came into collision with Bulgarian bands, and in order to calm these disturbances by thoroughly effectual means, irregular Turkish troops were sent into Bulgaria, charged with the command to 'stop the row,' but with no other instructions. Indiscriminate killing, with all the passions and horrors that bloodshed evokes in the half-civilised, followed, and there was no more trouble just then in the disturbed districts, for there was none to make trouble. In 1876 Abdul Aziz was deposed by a group of king-makers under Midhat Pasha, Murad V. reigned shadow-like for three months, and during the same year Abdul Hamid was finally selected to fill the throne, and stand forth as the Shadow of God. It was a disturbed and tottering inheritance to which he succeeded, riddled with the dry-rot of corruption, but the inheritor proved himself equal to the occasion.
For a little while he was all abroad, and at the bidding of Midhat, who had placed him on the throne, he summoned a kind of representative Turkish Parliament, by way of imbuing the Great Powers with the idea that he was an enlightened Shadow of God bent on reform. This parody of a Parliament lasted but a short time: it was no more than a faint, dissolving magic-lantern picture. In the spring of 1877 Rumania, under Russian encouragement, broke away from Turkish rule. Turkey declared war on Russia, and in 1878 found herself utterly defeated. At Adrianople was drawn up the Treaty of San Stefano, creating an independent Bulgarian state, and, in the opinion of Great Britain and Germany, giving Russia far greater influence in the Balkan Peninsula than was agreeable to that disastrous supporter of Turkey, the Balance of Power. In consequence the Treaty of San Stefano was superseded by the Treaty of Berlin.
In those arrangements Abdul Hamid had no voice, but he was well content to sit quiet, think about what was to be done with what was left him, and thank his waning crescent that once again the Balance of Power had secured Constantinople for him, leaving him free to deal with his Asiatic dominions, and such part of Europe as was left him, as he thought fit. He could safely trust that he would never be ejected from his throne by a foreign Power, and all he need do was to make himself safe against internal disturbances and revolutions which might upset him. And it was then that he begot in the womb of his cold and cunning brain a policy that was all his own, except in so far as the Bulgarian atrocities, consequent on feuds between Bulgars and Greeks, may be considered the father of that hideous birth. But it was he who suckled and nourished it, it was from his brain that it emerged, full-grown and in panoply of armour, as from the brain of Olympian Zeus came Pallas Athene. This new policy was in flat contradiction of all the previous policy, as he had received it from his predecessors, of strengthening Turkey by tributes of man-power from his subject tribes, but it would, he thought, have the same result of keeping the Turk supreme among the alien elements of the Empire. Times had changed; it behoved him to change the methods which hitherto had held together his hapless inheritance.
Now Abdul Hamid was not in any sense a wise man, and the ability which has been attributed to him, in view of the manner in which he successfully defied the civilisations of Europe, is based on premisses altogether false. He never really defied Europe at all; he always yielded, secure in his belief that Europe in the shape of the Balance of Power, was unanimous in keeping him where he was. He never even risked being turned out of Constantinople, for he knew--none better--that all Europe insisted on retaining him there. As regards wisdom, there was never a greater fool, but as regards cunning there was never a greater fox. He had a brain that was absolutely impervious to large ideas: the notion of consolidating and strengthening his Empire by ameliorating its internal conditions, by bringing it within speaking distance of the influence of civilisation and progress, by taking advantage of and developing its immense natural resources, by employing the brains and the industry of his subject races, seems never to have entered his head. He could