arantee. No better example can be cited than the effect of
its financial follies. When national bankruptcy, long contemplated by its
Government, supervened at last, the sultan had nothing more to fear from
Europe. He became, _ipso facto_, the cherished protege of every power
whose nationals had lent his country money.

Considering the magnitude of the change which Mahmud instituted, the stage
at which he left it, and the character of the society in which it had to
be carried out, it was unfortunate that he should have been followed on
the throne by two well-meaning weaklings, of whom the first was a
voluptuary, the second a fantastic spendthrift of doubtful sanity. Mahmud,
as has been said, being occupied for the greater part of his reign in
destroying the old order, had been able to reconstruct little more than a
framework. His operations had been almost entirely forcible--of a kind
understood by and congenial to the Osmanli character--and partly by
circumstances but more by his natural sympathies, he had been identified
from first to last with military enterprises. Though he was known to
contemplate the eventual supremacy of civil law, and the equality of all
sorts and conditions of his subjects before it, he did nothing to open
this vista to public view. Consequently he encountered little or no
factious opposition. Very few held briefs for either the Janissaries or
the Dere Beys; and fewer regretted them when they were gone. Osmanli
society identified itself with the new army and accepted the consequent
reform of the central or provincial administration. Nothing in these
changes seemed to affect Islam or the privileged position of Moslems in
the empire.

It was quite another matter when Abdul Mejid, in the beginning of his
reign, promulgated an imperial decree--the famous Tanzimat or Hatti Sherif
of Gulkhaneh--which, amid many excellent and popular provisions for the
continued reform of the administration, proclaimed the equality of
Christian and Moslem subjects in service, in reward, and before the law.
The new sultan, essentially a civilian and a man of easy-going
temperament, had been induced to believe that the end of an evolution,
which had only just begun, could be anticipated _per saltum_, and that he
and all his subjects would live happily together ever after. His
counsellors had been partly politicians, who for various reasons, good and
bad, wished to gain West European sympathy for their country, involved i