lected in favour of
provinces to the north, which were richer and more nearly related to the
ways into central Europe. When more attention began to be paid to it by
the Government, it had already become a cockpit for the new-born Christian
nationalities, which had been developed on the north, east, and south.
These were using every weapon, material and spiritual, to secure
preponderance in its society, and had created chronic disorder which the
Ottoman administration now weakly encouraged to save itself trouble, now
violently dragooned. Already the powers had not only proposed autonomy for
it, but begun to control its police and its finance. This was the last
straw. The public opinion which had slowly been forming for thirty years
gained the army, and Midhat's seed came to fruit.

By an irony of fate Macedonia not only supplied the spectacle which
exasperated the army to revolt, but by its very disorder made the
preparation of that revolt possible; for it was due to local limitations
of Ottoman sovereignty that the chief promoters of revolution were able to
conspire in safety. By another irony, two of the few progressive measures
ever encouraged by Abdul Hamid contributed to his undoing. If he had not
sent young officers to be trained abroad, the army, the one Ottoman
institution never allowed wholly to decay, would have remained outside the
conspiracy. If he had never promoted the construction of railways, as he
began to do after 1897, the Salonika army could have had no such influence
on affairs in Constantinople as it exerted in 1908 and again in 1909. As
it was, the sultan, at a mandate from Resna in Macedonia, re-enacted
Midhat's Constitution, and, a year later, saw an army from Salonika arrive
to uphold that Constitution against the reaction he had fostered, and to
send him, dethroned and captive, to the place whence itself had come.

7

_Revolution_

Looking back on this revolution across seven years of its consequences, we
see plainly enough that it was inspired far less by desire for humane
progress than by shame of Osmanli military decline. The 'Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity' programme which its authors put forward (a civilian
minority among them, sincerely enough), Europe accepted, and the populace
of the empire acted upon for a moment, did not express the motive of the
movement or eventually guide its course. The essence of that movement was
militant nationalism. The empire was to be regenerated, no