The life of Midhat Pasha; a record of his services, political reforms, banishment, and judicial murder

by Ali Haydar Mithat

That the forcible banishment of the Grand Vizier was a violation of the letter as well as the spirit of the Constitution promulgated and sworn to by the Sultan, has never been seriously denied. The “reason of State” urged would obviously cover any act of arbitrary power whatever. It was for the express purpose of putting an end to such an arbitrary régime that the Constitution was framed and insisted on. The flimsy pretext put forward, that it was in accordance with the 113th Article of the Constitution, will not bear the most superficial examination. The power therein conceded to the Sultan was in a rider to a clause declaring a state of siege when the safety of the State required it, and the purport and limits of the clause must necessarily govern the subsidiary provisions of the clause itself. Not only could a rider of this description not bear the interpretation sought to be placed upon it, but other substantial clauses of the Constitution directly forbade the exercise of any such arbitrary power, and provided for the elementary right that no man should be punished except after due trial. But further: clauses 31, 32, and 34 contained special and minute provisions for the arrest and trial of Ministers guilty of treason or malversation, so that both positively and negatively, in its substantial provisions and in its omissions, the banishment of Midhat, with its attendant circumstances, was as clear a violation of the Constitution as the coup d’état of the 2nd December 1852 in France.

But political morality and good faith and patriotism apart, it must be allowed that the tactics pursued by the Palace were, qua tactics, very cleverly devised. If the Sultan had struck at the Constitution as well as the champion of it; at reform at the same time as the reformer, he would undoubtedly have raised a storm in the country which would have immediately endangered his throne; but by striking down the father and pillar of the Reformers he practically killed reform, and put the Constitution at his mercy as certainly as if he had suppressed it then and there; and whilst pretending himself to champion both reform and the Constitution, he managed to play the rôle of Wat Tyler successfully, and to take the sting out of the blow, and conceal the full meaning of the act that he had just committed. There was a party in Constantinople, to which personal ambition was not a stranger, who imagined that Midhat was not essential to the cause of the Constitution, and that Abdul Hamid II. was sincere in his protestations of reforming ardour. Some were of good faith, and some were simply moved by ambition. Both very soon discovered their mistake, and in various distant provinces found leisure to reflect and repent of their confiding innocence.

The Palace, although they had hazarded this great coup, did not feel at all secure as to the effect it might produce on the population of Constantinople, in spite of all the measures of precaution that had been taken; and the order given to the captain of the Izzeddine to remain twenty‐four hours at anchor in the bay of Tchekmedje, was with a view, in case of a serious rising in the capital, of recalling Midhat and persuading him to resume his functions—until a more convenient opportunity arose. The Palace was playing for safety.

Stunned by the suddenness of the blow, entirely unprepared for any concerted action, and distracted by reports industriously spread, the people did not rise, and the Palace breathed freely. It had gained a complete victory.

* * * * *

Between the breaking up of the Conference and the breaking out of the war, the sequence of diplomatic action can be very briefly narrated. On the 19th January 1877 Prince Gortchakoff issued a Circular to the Powers, which can be summed up in the question, “What are you going to do about it?” One particular phrase, however, in this document must be noted. He says that the agreement in the Berlin Memorandum not being unanimous, and the crisis being aggravated, among other causes, by the revolution in Constantinople, the Cabinets recommenced negotiations, and, on the initiative of England, agreed upon a basis and guarantees to be discussed at a Conference at Constantinople. There is very little doubt that this revolution in Constantinople—which had the avowed object of checking absolutism and giving the Turkish people guarantees for good government—was in the eyes of Russia an aggravation of the crisis, and justified, and even necessitated, in her opinion, hostile action against Turkey. That Russia, who had undertaken the championship of liberty and progress among the inhabitants of a neighbouring empire, should be confronted by the establishment of institutions far more liberal and advanced than anything her own people were allowed to dream of; and that there should be sitting at Constantinople a Parliament, the very name of which was a terror and nightmare at St Petersburg, was without question an intolerable grievance.

À propos of this, the famous despatch of Count Pozzo di Borgo, of November 1828, to M. de Nesselrode, may be read with profit:

“When the Imperial Cabinet examines the question as to whether the moment had arrived to take up arms against the Porte, some doubts as to the urgency of this measure might exist in the minds of those who had not sufficiently meditated on the effects of the sanguinary reforms that the Ottoman Chief had just executed with terrible energy. But now the experience that we have just had ought to unite everybody in favour of the line then adopted. The Emperor has put the Turkish system to the proof, and His Majesty has found in it a commencement of material and moral organisation which hitherto it has never possessed. If the Sultan has been enabled to oppose to us a more lively and sustained resistance whilst he had scarcely collected the elements of his new plans of reform and improvement, how much more formidable should we have found him if he had had time to give them more consistency and solidity?...”