umenical
Patriarch of the Greeks and placed under an Exarch. Presently, her
peasantry growing ever more restive, passed from protest to revolt against
the Circassian refugee-colonists with whom the Porte was flooding the
land. The sultan, in an evil hour, for lack of trained troops, let loose
irregulars on the villages, and the Bulgarian atrocities, which they
committed in 1875, sowed a fatal harvest for his successor to reap. His
own time was almost fulfilled. The following spring a dozen high
officials, with the assent of the Sheikh-ul-Islam and the active dissent
of no one, took Abdul Aziz from his throne to a prison, wherein two days
later he perished, probably by his own hand. A puppet reigned three months
as Murad V, and then, at the bidding of the same king-makers whom his
uncle had obeyed, left the throne free for his brother Abdul Hamid, a man
of affairs and ability, who was to be the most conspicuous, or rather, the
most notorious Osmanli sultan since Suleiman.

6

_Relapse_

The new sultan, who had not expected his throne, found his realm in
perilous case. Nominally sovereign and a member of the Concert of Europe,
he was in reality a semi-neutralized dependant, existing, as an
undischarged bankrupt, on sufferance of the powers. Should the Concert be
dissolved, or even divided, and any one of its members be left free to
foreclose its Ottoman mortgages, the empire would be at an end. Internally
it was in many parts in open revolt, in all the rest stagnant and slowly
rotting. The thrice-foiled claimant to its succession, who six years
before had denounced the Black Sea clause of the Treaty of Paris and so
freed its hands for offence, was manifestly preparing a fresh assault.
Something drastic must be done; but what?

This danger of the empire's international situation, and also the disgrace
of it, had been evident for some time past to those who had any just
appreciation of affairs; and in the educated class, at any rate, something
like a public opinion, very apprehensive and very much ashamed, had
struggled into being. The discovery of a leader in Midhat Pasha, former
governor-general of Bagdad, and a king-maker of recent notoriety, induced
the party of this opinion to take precipitate action. Murad had been
deposed in August. Before the year was out Midhat presented himself before
Abdul Hamid with a formal demand for the promulgation of a Constitution,
proposing not only to put into execution the pio