Crescent and Iron Cross | Page 6

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 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