, has ever been able to
exhaust.

In the second place the Osmanli 'Turks', however fallen away from the
virtues of their ancestors, had not lost either 'the will to power' or
their capacity for governing under military law. If they had never
succeeded in learning to rule as civilians they had not forgotten how to
rule as soldiers.

In the third place the sultanate of Stambul had retained a vague but
valuable prestige, based partly on past history, partly on its pretension
to religious influence throughout a much larger area than its proper
dominions; and the conservative population of the latter was in great
measure very imperfectly informed of its sovereign's actual position.

In the fourth and last place, among the populations on whose loyalty the
Osmanli sultan could make good his claim, were several strong unexhausted
elements, especially in Anatolia. There are few more vigorous and enduring
peoples than the peasants of the central plateau of Asia Minor, north,
east, and south. With this rock of defence to stand upon, the sultan could
draw also on the strength of other more distant races, less firmly
attached to himself, but not less vigorous, such, for example, as the
Albanians of his European mountains and the Kurds of his Asiatic. However
decadent might be the Turco-Grecian Osmanli (he, unfortunately, had the
lion's share of office), those other elements had suffered no decline in
physical or mental development. Indeed, one cannot be among them now
without feeling that their day is not only not gone, but is still, for the
most part, yet to be.

Such were latent assets of the Osmanli Empire, appreciated imperfectly by
the prophets of its dissolution. Thanks to them, that empire continued not
only to hold together throughout the nineteenth century but, in some
measure, to consolidate itself. Even when the protective fence, set up by
European powers about it, was violated, as by Russia several times--in
1829, in 1854, and in 1877--the nation, which Mahmud had made, always
proved capable of stout enough resistance to delay the enemy till European
diplomacy, however slow of movement, could come to its aid, and ultimately
to dispose the victor to accept terms consistent with its continued
existence. It was an existence, of course, of sufferance, but one which
grew better assured the longer it lasted. By an irony of the Osmanli
position, the worse the empire was administered, the stronger became its
international gu