By an irony of fate Macedonia not only supplied the spectacle which exasperated the army to revolt, but by its very disorder made the preparation of that revolt possible; for it was due to local limitations of Ottoman sovereignty that the chief promoters of revolution were able to conspire in safety.  By another irony, two of the few progressive measures ever encouraged by Abdul Hamid contributed to his undoing.  If he had not sent young officers to be trained abroad, the army, the one Ottoman institution never allowed wholly to decay, would have remained outside the conspiracy.  If he had never promoted the construction of railways, as he began to do after 1897, the Salonika army could have had no such influence on affairs in Constantinople as it exerted in 1908 and again in 1909.  As it was, the sultan, at a mandate from Resna in Macedonia, re-enacted Midhat’s Constitution, and, a year later, saw an army from Salonika arrive to uphold that Constitution against the reaction he had fostered, and to send him, dethroned and captive, to the place whence itself had come.

7

Revolution

Looking back on this revolution across seven years of its consequences, we see plainly enough that it was inspired far less by desire for humane progress than by shame of Osmanli military decline.  The ’Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ programme which its authors put forward (a civilian minority among them, sincerely enough), Europe accepted, and the populace of the empire acted upon for a moment, did not express the motive of the movement or eventually guide its course.  The essence of that movement was militant nationalism.  The empire was to be regenerated, not by humanizing it but by Ottomanizing it.  The Osmanli, the man of the sword, was the type to which all others, who wished to be of the nation, were to conform.  Such as did not so wish must be eliminated by the rest.

The revolutionary Committee in Salonika, called ‘of Union and Progress’, held up its cards at first, but by 1910 events had forced its hand on the table.  The definite annexation of Bosnia and Hercegovina by Austria-Hungary in 1908, and the declaration of independence and assumption of the title Tsar by the ruler of Bulgaria, since they were the price to be paid by the revolutionaries for a success largely made in Germany, were opposed officially only pro forma; but when uninformed opinion in the empire was exasperated thereby against Christendom, the Committee, to appease reactionaries, had to give premature proof of pan-Osmanli and pro-Moslem intentions by taking drastic action against rayas.  The Greeks of the empire, never without suspicions, had failed to testify the same enthusiasm for Ottoman fraternity which others, e.g. the Armenians, had shown; now they resumed their separatist attitude, and made it clear that they still aspired, not to Ottoman, but to Hellenic nationality.  Nor were even the Moslems of the empire unanimous for fraternity