ury you would not find in all Mesopotamia an
agricultural implement that was in any way superior to the ploughs and
the flails of more than two thousand years ago. But so long as there was
a palace-guard about the gates to secure the safety of the Sultan and
his corrupt military oligarchy, so long as there were houris to divert
their leisure, tribute of youths to swell their armies, and taxes wrung
from starving subjects to maintain their pomp, there was not one of
those who held the reins of government who cared the flick of an eyelash
for the needs of the nations on whom the Empire rested, for the
cultivation of its soil that would yield a hundredfold to the skilled
husbandman, or for the exploitation and development of its internal
wealth. While there was left in the emaciated carcase of the Turkish
Empire enough live tissue for the cancerous Government to grow fat on,
it gave not one thought to the welfare of all those races on whom it had
fastened itself. Province after province of its European dominions
might be lost to it, but the Balance of Power still kept the Sultan on
his throne, and left the peoples of Asia Minor and Syria at his mercy.
They were largely of alien religion and of alien tongue, and their
individual weakness was his strength. Neglect, and the decay consequent
on neglect, was the lot of all who languished under that abominable
despotism.

With the accession in 1876 of Abdul Hamid, of cursed memory, there
dawned on the doomed subject peoples of the Ottoman Empire a day of
bloodier import than any yet. The year before and during that year had
occurred the Bulgarian atrocities and massacres, and the word 'massacre'
lingered and made music in Abdul Hamid's brain. He said it over to
himself and dwelt upon it, and meditated on the nature and possibilities
of massacre. The troubles which massacre had calmed had arisen before
his accession out of the establishment of the Bulgarian Exarchate, which
corresponded to the Greek Patriarchate, and was given power over
districts and peoples whom the Greeks justly considered to belong to
them by blood and religion. Greek armed bands came into collision with
Bulgarian bands, and in order to calm these disturbances by thoroughly
effectual means, irregular Turkish troops were sent into Bulgaria,
charged with the command to 'stop the row,' but with no other
instructions. Indiscriminate killing, with all the passions and horrors
that bloodshed evokes in the half-civi