ahmud's persistency was the 'Turkey' we have seen
in our own time--that Turkey irretrievably Asiatic in spirit under a
semi-European system of administration, which has governed despotically in
the interests of one creed and one class, with slipshod, makeshift
methods, but has always governed, and little by little has extended its
range. Knowing its imperfections and its weakness, we have watched with
amazement its hand feeling forward none the less towards one remote
frontier district after another, painfully but surely getting its grip,
and at last closing on Turcoman chiefs and Kurdish beys, first in the
Anatolian and Cilician hills, then in the mountains of Armenia, finally in
the wildest Alps of the Persian borderland. We have marked its stealthy
movement into the steppes and deserts of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Arabia--
now drawn back, now pushed farther till it has reached and held regions
over which Mahmud could claim nothing but a suzerainty in name. To judge
how far the shrinkage of the Osmanli European empire has been compensated
by expansion of its Asiatic, one has only to compare the political state
of Kurdistan, as it was at the end of the eighteenth century, and as it
has been in our own time.

It is impossible to believe that the Greek Empire, however buttressed and
protected by foreign powers, could ever have reconstituted itself after
falling so low as it fell in the fourteenth century and as the Osmanli
Empire fell in the eighteenth; and it is clear that the latter must still
have possessed latent springs of vitality, deficient in the former. What
can these have been? It is worth while to try to answer this question at
the present juncture, since those springs, if they existed a hundred years
ago, can hardly now be dry.

In the first place it had its predominant creed. This had acted as Islam
acts everywhere, as a very strong social bond, uniting the vast majority
of subjects in all districts except certain parts of the European empire,
in instinctive loyalty to the person of the padishah, whatever might be
felt about his government. Thus had it acted with special efficacy in Asia
Minor, whose inhabitants the Osmanli emperors, unlike the Greek, had
always been at some pains to attach to themselves. The sultan, therefore,
could still count on general support from the population of his empire's
heart, and had at his disposal the resources of a country which no
administration, however improvident or malign