Crescent and Iron Cross | Page 6

easily have done all this: there was not a Power in Europe that would not have lent him a helping hand in development and reform, in the establishment of a solvent state, in aiding the condition of the peoples over whom he ruled. In whatever he did, provided that it furthered the welfare of his subjects, whether Turk, Armenian, or Arab, the whole Concert of Europe would have provided him with cash, with missionaries, with engineers, and all the resources of the arts and sciences of peace and of progress. But being a felon, with crime and cunning to take the place of wisdom, he preferred to develop his Empire on his own original lines. In Europe he was but suffered to exist. There remained Asia.
The policy of previous Osmanli rulers has already been roughly defined. They strengthened themselves and the military Turkish despotism round them by absorbing the manhood of the tribes over which they had obtained dominion. Abdul Hamid reversed that policy; he strengthened the Turkish supremacy, not by drawing into it the manhood of his subject peoples, but by destroying that manhood. In proportion, so his foxlike brain reasoned, as his alien subjects were weak, so were the Turks strong. A consistent weakening of alien nations would strengthen the hold of those who governed the Ottoman Empire. It was as if a man suffered from gout in his foot: he could get rid of the gout by wholesome living, the result of which would be that his foot ceased to trouble him. But the plan which he adopted was to cause his foot to mortify by process of inhuman savagery. When it was dead it would trouble him no longer.
He was well aware that the Turkish people only comprised some forty per cent, of the population of the Turkish Empire: numerically they were weaker than the alien peoples who composed the rest of it. Something had to be done to bring the governing Power up to such a proportionate strength as should secure its supremacy, and the most convenient plan was to weaken the alien elements. The scheme, though yet inchoate, had been tried with success in the case of the Bulgarians and Greeks, and to test it further he stirred up Albanians against the inhabitants of Old Servia with gratifying results. They weakened each other, and he further weakened them both by the employment of Turkish troops in Macedonia to quell the disturbances which he had himself fomented. There were massacres and atrocities, and no more trouble just then from Macedonia. Having thus tested his plan and found no flaw in it, he settled to adopt it. But European combinations did not really much interest him, for he was aware that the Great Powers, to whose sacred Balance he owed the permanence of his throne, would not tolerate interference with European peoples, and he turned his attention to Asia Minor. There were excrescences there which he could not absorb, but which might be destroyed. He could use the knife on living tissues which the impaired digestion of the Ottoman Empire could not assimilate. So he hit on this fresh scheme, which his hellish cunning devised with a matchless sense of the adaptation of the means to the end, and he created (though he did not live to perfect) a new policy that reversed the traditions of five hundred years. That is no light task to undertake, and when we consider that since his deposition, now nine years ago, that policy has reaped results undreamed of perhaps by him, we can see how far-sighted his cunning was. To-day it is being followed out by the very combination that deposed him; his aims have been fully justified, and for that precise reason we are right to classify him among the abhorred of mankind. He had an opportunity such as is given to the few, and he made the utmost of it, even as his greater successor on the throne of Turkey for the present, namely Wilhelm II. of Prussia, has done, in the service of the devil. 'Well done, thou good and faithful servant,' must surely have been his well-deserved welcome, when he left the hell he had made on earth for another.
Of all his subjects the Armenians were the most progressive, the most industrious, the most capable. They therefore contributed, according to that perverted foxlike mind, one of the greatest menaces to the stability of his throne, which henceforth should owe its strength to the weakness of those it governed. They, as all the world knows, are a peaceful Christian people, and it was against them that Abdul Hamid directed the policy which he had tested in Europe. The instruments he employed to put it in force were the Kurds, a turbulent shepherd race marching with and