Such were latent assets of the Osmanli Empire, appreciated imperfectly by the prophets of its dissolution.  Thanks to them, that empire continued not only to hold together throughout the nineteenth century but, in some measure, to consolidate itself.  Even when the protective fence, set up by European powers about it, was violated, as by Russia several times—­in 1829, in 1854, and in 1877—­the nation, which Mahmud had made, always proved capable of stout enough resistance to delay the enemy till European diplomacy, however slow of movement, could come to its aid, and ultimately to dispose the victor to accept terms consistent with its continued existence.  It was an existence, of course, of sufferance, but one which grew better assured the longer it lasted.  By an irony of the Osmanli position, the worse the empire was administered, the stronger became its international guarantee.  No better example can be cited than the effect of its financial follies.  When national bankruptcy, long contemplated by its Government, supervened at last, the sultan had nothing more to fear from Europe.  He became, ipso facto, the cherished protege of every power whose nationals had lent his country money.

Considering the magnitude of the change which Mahmud instituted, the stage at which he left it, and the character of the society in which it had to be carried out, it was unfortunate that he should have been followed on the throne by two well-meaning weaklings, of whom the first was a voluptuary, the second a fantastic spendthrift of doubtful sanity.  Mahmud, as has been said, being occupied for the greater part of his reign in destroying the old order, had been able to reconstruct little more than a framework.  His operations had been almost entirely forcible—­of a kind understood by and congenial to the Osmanli character—­and partly by circumstances but more by his natural sympathies, he had been identified from first to last with military enterprises.  Though he was known to contemplate the eventual supremacy of civil law, and the equality of all sorts and conditions of his subjects before it, he did nothing to open this vista to public view.  Consequently he encountered little or no factious opposition.  Very few held briefs for either the Janissaries or the Dere Beys; and fewer regretted them when they were gone.  Osmanli society identified itself with the new army and accepted the consequent reform of the central or provincial administration.  Nothing in these changes seemed to affect Islam or the privileged position of Moslems in the empire.

It was quite another matter when Abdul Mejid, in the beginning of his reign, promulgated an imperial decree—­the famous Tanzimat or Hatti Sherif of Gulkhaneh—­which, amid many excellent and popular provisions for the continued reform of the administration, proclaimed the equality of Christian and Moslem subjects in service, in reward, and before the law.  The new sultan, essentially a civilian and a man of easy-going temperament,