Hamid's failure was owed in the main
to facts independent of his personality or statecraft. The expansion of
Islam over an immense geographical area and among peoples living in
incompatible stages of sophistication, under most diverse political and
social conditions, has probably made any universal caliphial authority for
ever impossible. The original idea of the caliphate, like that of the
_jehad_ or holy war of the faithful, presupposed that all Moslems were
under governments of their own creed, and, perhaps, under one government.
Moreover, if such a caliph were ever to be again, an Osmanli sultan would
not be a strong candidate. Apart from the disqualification of his blood,
he being not of the Prophet's tribe nor even an Arab, he is lord of a
state irretrievably compromised in purist eyes (as Wahabis and Senussis
have testified once and again) by its Byzantine heritage of necessary
relations with infidels. Abdul Hamid's predecessors for two centuries or
more had been at no pains to infuse reality into their nominal leadership
of the faithful. To call a real caliphate out of so long abeyance could
hardly have been effected even by a bold soldier, who appealed to the
general imagination of Moslems; and certainly was beyond the power of a
timid civilian.

When Abdul Hamid had played this card and failed, he had no other; and his
natural pusillanimity and shiftiness induced him to withdraw ever more
into the depths of his palace, and there use his intelligence in
exploiting this shameful dependence of his country on foreign powers.
Unable or unwilling to encourage national resistance, he consoled himself,
as a weak malcontent will, by setting one power against another,
pin-pricking the stronger and blustering to the weaker. The history of his
reign is a long record of protests and surrenders to the great in big
matters, as to Great Britain in the matter of Egypt in 1881, to Russia in
that of Eastern Rumelia in 1885, to France on the question of the
Constantinople quays and other claims, and to all the powers in 1881 in
the matter of the financial control. Between times he put in such
pin-pricks as he could, removing his neighbours' landmarks in the Aden
_hinterland_ or the Sinaitic peninsula. He succeeded, however, in keeping
his empire out of a foreign war with any power for about thirty years,
with the single exception of a brief conflict with Greece in 1897. While
in the first half of his reign he was at pains to make