n
potential bondage to Russia since the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi (1833),
and recently afflicted by Ibrahim Pasha's victory at Nizib; and they
looked to Great Britain to get them out of the Syrian mess. Partly also
Abdul Mejid had been influenced by enthusiasts, who set more store by
ideas or the phrases in which they were expressed, than by the evidence of
facts. There were then, as since, 'young men in a hurry' among the more
Europeanized Osmanlis. The net result of the sultan's precipitancy was to
set against himself and his policy all who wished that such it
consummation of the reform process might never come and all who knew it
would never come, if snatched at thus--that is, both the 'Old Turks' and
the moderate Liberals; and, further, to change for the worse the spirit in
which the new machine of government was being worked and in which fresh
developments of it would be accepted.

To his credit, however, Abdul Mejid went on with administrative reform.
The organization of the army into corps--the foundation of the existing
system--and the imposition of five years' service on all subjects of the
empire (in theory which an Albanian rising caused to be imperfectly
realized in fact), belong to the early part of his reign; as do also, on
the civil side, the institution of responsible councils of state and
formation of ministries, and much provision for secondary education. To
his latest years is to be credited the codification of the civil law. He
had the advantage of some dozen initial years of comparative security from
external foes, after the Syrian question had been settled in his favour by
Great Britain and her allied powers at the cheap price of a guarantee of
hereditary succession to the house of Mehemet Ali. Thanks to the same
support, war with Persia was avoided and war with Russia postponed.

But the provinces, even if quiet (which some of them, e.g. the Lebanon in
the early 'forties', were not), proved far from content. If the form of
Osmanli government had changed greatly, its spirit had changed little, and
defective communications militated against the responsibility of officials
to the centre. Money was scarce, and the paper currency--an ill-omened
device of Mahmud's--was depreciated, distrusted, and regarded as an
imperial betrayal of confidence. Finally, the hostility of Russia,
notoriously unabated, and the encouragement of aspiring _rayas_ credited
to her and other foreign powers made bad blood between