had been induced to believe that the end of an evolution, which had only just begun, could be anticipated per saltum, and that he and all his subjects would live happily together ever after.  His counsellors had been partly politicians, who for various reasons, good and bad, wished to gain West European sympathy for their country, involved in potential bondage to Russia since the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi (1833), and recently afflicted by Ibrahim Pasha’s victory at Nizib; and they looked to Great Britain to get them out of the Syrian mess.  Partly also Abdul Mejid had been influenced by enthusiasts, who set more store by ideas or the phrases in which they were expressed, than by the evidence of facts.  There were then, as since, ‘young men in a hurry’ among the more Europeanized Osmanlis.  The net result of the sultan’s precipitancy was to set against himself and his policy all who wished that such it consummation of the reform process might never come and all who knew it would never come, if snatched at thus—­that is, both the ‘Old Turks’ and the moderate Liberals; and, further, to change for the worse the spirit in which the new machine of government was being worked and in which fresh developments of it would be accepted.

To his credit, however, Abdul Mejid went on with administrative reform.  The organization of the army into corps—­the foundation of the existing system—­and the imposition of five years’ service on all subjects of the empire (in theory which an Albanian rising caused to be imperfectly realized in fact), belong to the early part of his reign; as do also, on the civil side, the institution of responsible councils of state and formation of ministries, and much provision for secondary education.  To his latest years is to be credited the codification of the civil law.  He had the advantage of some dozen initial years of comparative security from external foes, after the Syrian question had been settled in his favour by Great Britain and her allied powers at the cheap price of a guarantee of hereditary succession to the house of Mehemet Ali.  Thanks to the same support, war with Persia was avoided and war with Russia postponed.

But the provinces, even if quiet (which some of them, e.g. the Lebanon in the early ‘forties’, were not), proved far from content.  If the form of Osmanli government had changed greatly, its spirit had changed little, and defective communications militated against the responsibility of officials to the centre.  Money was scarce, and the paper currency—­an ill-omened device of Mahmud’s—­was depreciated, distrusted, and regarded as an imperial betrayal of confidence.  Finally, the hostility of Russia, notoriously unabated, and the encouragement of aspiring rayas credited to her and other foreign powers made bad blood between creeds and encouraged opposition to the execution of the pro-Christian Tanzimat.  When Christian turbulence at last brought on, in 1854, the Russian attack which developed into the Crimean