6

Relapse

The new sultan, who had not expected his throne, found his realm in perilous case.  Nominally sovereign and a member of the Concert of Europe, he was in reality a semi-neutralized dependant, existing, as an undischarged bankrupt, on sufferance of the powers.  Should the Concert be dissolved, or even divided, and any one of its members be left free to foreclose its Ottoman mortgages, the empire would be at an end.  Internally it was in many parts in open revolt, in all the rest stagnant and slowly rotting.  The thrice-foiled claimant to its succession, who six years before had denounced the Black Sea clause of the Treaty of Paris and so freed its hands for offence, was manifestly preparing a fresh assault.  Something drastic must be done; but what?

This danger of the empire’s international situation, and also the disgrace of it, had been evident for some time past to those who had any just appreciation of affairs; and in the educated class, at any rate, something like a public opinion, very apprehensive and very much ashamed, had struggled into being.  The discovery of a leader in Midhat Pasha, former governor-general of Bagdad, and a king-maker of recent notoriety, induced the party of this opinion to take precipitate action.  Murad had been deposed in August.  Before the year was out Midhat presented himself before Abdul Hamid with a formal demand for the promulgation of a Constitution, proposing not only to put into execution the pious hopes of the two Hatti Sherifs of Abdul Mejid but also to limit the sovereign and govern the empire by representative institutions.  The new sultan, hardly settled on his uneasy throne, could not deny those who had deposed his two predecessors, and, shrewdly aware that ripe facts would not be long in getting the better of immature ideas, accepted.  A parliament was summoned; an electorate, with only the haziest notions of what it was about, went through the form of sending representatives to Constantinople; and the sittings were inaugurated by a speech from the throne, framed on the most approved Britannic model, the deputies, it is said, jostling and crowding the while to sit, as many as possible, on the right, which they understood was always the side of powers that be.

It is true this extemporized chamber never had a chance.  The Russians crossed the Pruth before it had done much more than verify its powers, and the thoughts and energies of the Osmanlis were soon occupied with the most severe and disastrous struggle in which the empire had ever engaged.  But it is equally certain that it could not have turned to account any chance it might have had.  Once more the ‘young men in a hurry’ had snatched at the end of an evolution hardly begun, without taking into account the immaturity of Osmanli society in political education and political capacity.  After suspension during the war, the parliament was dissolved unregretted, and its creator was tried for his life, and banished.