Internally, the empire passed more and more under the government of the imperial household.  Defeated by the sheer geographical difficulty of controlling directly an area so vast and inadequately equipped with means of communication, Abdul Hamid soon relaxed the spasmodic efforts of his early years to better the condition of his subjects; and, uncontrolled and demoralized by the national disgrace, the administration went from bad to much worse.  Ministers irresponsible; officials without sense of public obligation; venality in all ranks; universal suspicion and delation; violent remedies, such as the Armenian massacres of 1894, for diseases due to neglect; the peasantry, whether Moslem or Christian, but especially Christian, forced ultimately to liquidate all accounts; impoverishment of the whole empire by the improvidence and oppression of the central power—­ such phrasing of the conventional results of ‘Palace’ government expresses inadequately the fruits of Yildiz under Abdul Hamid II.

Pari passu with this disorder of central and provincial administration increased the foreign encroachments on the empire.  The nation saw not only rapid multiplication of concessions and hypothecations to aliens, and of alien persons themselves installed in its midst under extra-territorial immunity from its laws, secured by the capitulations, but also whole provinces sequestered, administered independently of the sultan’s government, and prepared for eventual alienation.  Egypt, Tunisia, Eastern Rumelia, Krete—­these had all been withdrawn from Ottoman control since the Berlin settlement, and now Macedonia seemed to be going the same way.  Bitter to swallow as the other losses had been—­pills thinly sugared with a guarantee of suzerainty—­the loss of Macedonia would be more bitter still; for, if it were withdrawn from Ottoman use and profit, Albania would follow and so would the command of the north Aegean and the Adriatic shores; while an ancient Moslem population would remain at Christian mercy.

It was partly Ottoman fault, partly the fault of circumstances beyond Ottoman control, that this district had become a scandal and a reproach.  In the days of Osmanli greatness Macedonia had been neglected in favour of provinces to the north, which were richer and more nearly related to the ways into central Europe.  When more attention began to be paid to it by the Government, it had already become a cockpit for the new-born Christian nationalities, which had been developed on the north, east, and south.  These were using every weapon, material and spiritual, to secure preponderance in its society, and had created chronic disorder which the Ottoman administration now weakly encouraged to save itself trouble, now violently dragooned.  Already the powers had not only proposed autonomy for it, but begun to control its police and its finance.  This was the last straw.  The public opinion which had slowly been forming for thirty years gained the army, and Midhat’s seed came to fruit.