its Author's final banishment
from Adrianople to Akka. Relentless, devastating, and with ever-increasing
momentum, it ominously unfolded, damaging the prestige of the Empire,
dismembering its territory, dethroning its sultans, sweeping away their
dynasty, degrading and deposing its Caliph, disestablishing its religion,
and extinguishing its glory. The "sick man" of Europe, whose condition had
been unerringly diagnosed by the Divine Physician, and whose doom was
pronounced inevitable, fell a prey, during the reign of five successive
sultans, all degenerate, all deposed, to a series of convulsions which, in
the end, proved fatal to his life. Imperial Turkey that had, under
'Abdu'l-Majid, been admitted into the European Concert, and had emerged
victorious from the Crimean War, entered, under his successor,
'Abdu'l-'Aziz, upon a period of swift decline, culminating, soon after
'Abdu'l-Baha's passing, in the doom which the judgment of God had
pronounced against it.

Risings in Crete and the Balkans marked the reign of this, the 32nd sultan
of his dynasty, a despot whose mind was vacuous, whose recklessness was
extreme, whose extravagance knew no bounds. The Eastern Question entered
upon an acute phase. His gross misrule gave rise to movements which were
to exercise far-reaching effects upon his realm, while his continual and
enormous borrowings, leading to a state of semibankruptcy, introduced the
principle of foreign control over the finances of his empire. A
conspiracy, leading to a palace revolution, finally deposed him. A fatva
of the mufti denounced his incapacity and extravagance. Four days later he
was assassinated, and was succeeded by his nephew, Murad V, whose mind had
been reduced to a nullity by intemperance and by a long seclusion in the
Cage. Declared to be imbecile, he, after a reign of three months, was
deposed and was succeeded by the subtle, the resourceful, the suspicious,
the tyrannical 'Abdu'l-Hamid II who "proved to be the most mean, cunning,
untrustworthy and cruel intriguer of the long dynasty of U_th_man." "No
one knew," it was written of him, "from day to day who was the person on
whose advice the sultan overruled his ostensible ministers, whether a
favorite lady of his harem, or a eunuch, or some fanatical dervish, or an
astrologer, or a spy." The Bulgarian atrocities heralded the black reign
of this "Great Assassin," which thrilled Europe with horror, and were
characterized by Gladstone as "the bas