than a similar measure would have meant in a Christian empire.  For, the life of Islam being war, military service binds Moslems together and to their chiefs as it binds men under no other dispensation; therefore Mahmud, so far as he was able to enforce his decree, created not merely a national army but a nation.  His success was most immediate and complete in Anatolia, the homeland of the Osmanlis.  There, however, it was attained only by the previous reduction of those feudal families which, for many generations, had arrogated to themselves the levying and control of local forces.  Hence, as in Constantinople with the Janissaries, so in the provinces with the Dere Beys, destruction of a drastic order had to precede construction, and more of Mahmud’s reign had to be devoted to the former than remained for the latter.

He did, however, live to see not only the germ of a nation emerge from chaos, but also the framework of an organization for governing it well or ill.  The centralized bureaucracy which he succeeded in initiating was, of course, wretchedly imperfect both in constitution and equipment.  But it promised to promote the end he had in view and no other, inasmuch as, being the only existent machine of government, it derived any effective power it had from himself alone.  Dependent on Stambul, it served to turn thither the eyes and prayers of the provincials.  The naturally submissive and peaceful population of Asia Minor quickly accustomed itself to look beyond the dismantled strongholds of its fallen beys.  As for the rest—­ contumacious and bellicose beys and sheikhs of Kurdish hills and Syrian steppes—­their hour of surrender was yet to come.

The eventual product of Mahmud’s persistency was the ‘Turkey’ we have seen in our own time—­that Turkey irretrievably Asiatic in spirit under a semi-European system of administration, which has governed despotically in the interests of one creed and one class, with slipshod, makeshift methods, but has always governed, and little by little has extended its range.  Knowing its imperfections and its weakness, we have watched with amazement its hand feeling forward none the less towards one remote frontier district after another, painfully but surely getting its grip, and at last closing on Turcoman chiefs and Kurdish beys, first in the Anatolian and Cilician hills, then in the mountains of Armenia, finally in the wildest Alps of the Persian borderland.  We have marked its stealthy movement into the steppes and deserts of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Arabia—­ now drawn back, now pushed farther till it has reached and held regions over which Mahmud could claim nothing but a suzerainty in name.  To judge how far the shrinkage of the Osmanli European empire has been compensated by expansion of its Asiatic, one has only to compare the political state of Kurdistan, as it was at the end of the eighteenth century, and as it has been in our own time.