any, stand in them?  The acceptance of the Ottoman power into the Concert of Europe, though formally notified to Abdul Mejid, had proved an empty thing.  In that galley there was no place for a sultan except as a dependent or a slave.  As an Asiatic power, however, exerting temporal sway over some eighteen million bodies and religious influence over many times more souls, the Osmanli caliph might command a place in the sun.

The result belied these hopes.  Abdul Hamid’s failure was owed in the main to facts independent of his personality or statecraft.  The expansion of Islam over an immense geographical area and among peoples living in incompatible stages of sophistication, under most diverse political and social conditions, has probably made any universal caliphial authority for ever impossible.  The original idea of the caliphate, like that of the jehad or holy war of the faithful, presupposed that all Moslems were under governments of their own creed, and, perhaps, under one government.  Moreover, if such a caliph were ever to be again, an Osmanli sultan would not be a strong candidate.  Apart from the disqualification of his blood, he being not of the Prophet’s tribe nor even an Arab, he is lord of a state irretrievably compromised in purist eyes (as Wahabis and Senussis have testified once and again) by its Byzantine heritage of necessary relations with infidels.  Abdul Hamid’s predecessors for two centuries or more had been at no pains to infuse reality into their nominal leadership of the faithful.  To call a real caliphate out of so long abeyance could hardly have been effected even by a bold soldier, who appealed to the general imagination of Moslems; and certainly was beyond the power of a timid civilian.

When Abdul Hamid had played this card and failed, he had no other; and his natural pusillanimity and shiftiness induced him to withdraw ever more into the depths of his palace, and there use his intelligence in exploiting this shameful dependence of his country on foreign powers.  Unable or unwilling to encourage national resistance, he consoled himself, as a weak malcontent will, by setting one power against another, pin-pricking the stronger and blustering to the weaker.  The history of his reign is a long record of protests and surrenders to the great in big matters, as to Great Britain in the matter of Egypt in 1881, to Russia in that of Eastern Rumelia in 1885, to France on the question of the Constantinople quays and other claims, and to all the powers in 1881 in the matter of the financial control.  Between times he put in such pin-pricks as he could, removing his neighbours’ landmarks in the Aden hinterland or the Sinaitic peninsula.  He succeeded, however, in keeping his empire out of a foreign war with any power for about thirty years, with the single exception of a brief conflict with Greece in 1897.  While in the first half of his reign he was at pains to make no European friend, in the latter he fell more and more under the influence of Germany, which, almost from the accession of Kaiser Wilhelm II, began to prepare a southward way for future use, and alone of the powers, never browbeat the sultan.