It is impossible to believe that the Greek Empire, however buttressed and protected by foreign powers, could ever have reconstituted itself after falling so low as it fell in the fourteenth century and as the Osmanli Empire fell in the eighteenth; and it is clear that the latter must still have possessed latent springs of vitality, deficient in the former.  What can these have been?  It is worth while to try to answer this question at the present juncture, since those springs, if they existed a hundred years ago, can hardly now be dry.

In the first place it had its predominant creed.  This had acted as Islam acts everywhere, as a very strong social bond, uniting the vast majority of subjects in all districts except certain parts of the European empire, in instinctive loyalty to the person of the padishah, whatever might be felt about his government.  Thus had it acted with special efficacy in Asia Minor, whose inhabitants the Osmanli emperors, unlike the Greek, had always been at some pains to attach to themselves.  The sultan, therefore, could still count on general support from the population of his empire’s heart, and had at his disposal the resources of a country which no administration, however improvident or malign, has ever been able to exhaust.

In the second place the Osmanli ‘Turks’, however fallen away from the virtues of their ancestors, had not lost either ‘the will to power’ or their capacity for governing under military law.  If they had never succeeded in learning to rule as civilians they had not forgotten how to rule as soldiers.

In the third place the sultanate of Stambul had retained a vague but valuable prestige, based partly on past history, partly on its pretension to religious influence throughout a much larger area than its proper dominions; and the conservative population of the latter was in great measure very imperfectly informed of its sovereign’s actual position.

In the fourth and last place, among the populations on whose loyalty the Osmanli sultan could make good his claim, were several strong unexhausted elements, especially in Anatolia.  There are few more vigorous and enduring peoples than the peasants of the central plateau of Asia Minor, north, east, and south.  With this rock of defence to stand upon, the sultan could draw also on the strength of other more distant races, less firmly attached to himself, but not less vigorous, such, for example, as the Albanians of his European mountains and the Kurds of his Asiatic.  However decadent might be the Turco-Grecian Osmanli (he, unfortunately, had the lion’s share of office), those other elements had suffered no decline in physical or mental development.  Indeed, one cannot be among them now without feeling that their day is not only not gone, but is still, for the most part, yet to be.