The telegraph wrought further changes; it brought the Central Government, restored to order by Reshid Pasha, into closer touch with the provinces, made greater control of officials possible, and finally robbed these of all initiative. Moreover, higher officials were no longer chosen from among the local magnates, but drawn from a lower class, less likely to act independently; by this a new bureaucracy was called into being and its ineptitude caused further trouble.
In the reign of Abdul Hamid all the vilayets of European Turkey were absolutely controlled from Yildiz Kiosk, and as that ruler was far above concerning himself with such trifling matters as racial distinctions among his subjects, unless they proved of value in sowing discord between the various nationalities under his sway, Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, and others met with little consideration at the hands of the Sultan’s deputies. Force majeure applied by the Great Powers was the only argument to which Sultan Abdul Hamid answered, and the Russo-Turkish war brought about changes which we have already considered.
The great body of the Turkish nation lived quite contentedly under Abdul Hamid. He was Sultan, Caliph, God’s Shadow upon Earth, and ordered mundane matters from heights almost as remote as the high heavens. He was the head of a theocratic power, based on militarism, and his Turkish subjects were content that he should remain so. To them a ruler who declined to differentiate between dynamo and dynamite was well suited. Every village provided for its own security by appointing watchmen, and education was the concern of the churches. The Gendarmerie was not concerned with preventing crime or tracing criminals unless the State, not private property, were endangered.
That a State so raised, so maintained, should act as an organization for protecting and furthering the interests of its subjects, of whatever race or creed, is not to be expected, neither did the great body of the Turkish nation ever wish it to assume such functions. For the Turks were the dominant race, the conquerors, and to them any idea of their non-Islamic, non-Turk fellow-subjects as equals was inconceivable; their religion made such a state of affairs impossible. Thus for the ordinary Turk, as for the more enlightened ones, those in power had every interest in supporting the old order of things, for most of them must have known that once the non-Turk elements were placed on a level with the sons of Othman, the latter’s locus standi would have gone, seeing his ineptitude for any modern thought, his incapacity for progress. The raison d’être of the State was to perpetuate Osmanli ascendancy, and to this end Abdul Hamid worked, and he worked well for his own people. This ascendancy was jealously guarded; no Christian was ever allowed executive command over Moslems, and to this is due in great measure the failure of all attempted reforms in the naval and military services of the Ottoman Empire.
Added to this is a certain distrust which the Turk has of all Christians, believing that a man who does not follow the law of the Koran cannot be absolutely loyal to the Sultan. In many instances the Turk’s suspicions were justified, but it was not religious sentiment alone which separated Moslem and non-Moslem in the Ottoman Empire, for those Jews who are the Sultan’s subjects are well content to remain so. Unlike other non-Moslem subjects of the Sultan, those Jews, mostly refugees from Spain’s and Portugal’s most Catholic Majesties, have no outside Powers to espouse their cause, nor have they any grievance, for, being isolated, the Porte has no reason to fear them. It is most unlikely that the Jews of Saloniki, for instance, would welcome the Slavs as masters, nor have the Greeks, since their occupation of that town, ingratiated themselves with the children of Israel.
Like the Jews, the Turks form a religious community rather than a State in its modern conception, and these two resemble each other inasmuch as neither understands the word “Fatherland” as applying to a country exclusively occupied by their co-nationals. The word “Vatan,” meaning Motherland, conveys no definite meaning to the Turks; it had to be interpreted to them by the self-appointed leaders of thought who formed the Young Turk Party. To those who have lived in India the word “Vatan” will be familiar in the sense that it defines a man’s place of origin rather than a sentimental idea, such as the words “Home,” “Patria,” “Heimat,” or “Vaterland.”
To this inarticulate mass of Moslems living contentedly under the Sultan’s sway, a body of Young Turks brought the Western conception of a State. The “Spirit of the East,” so strong among the Turks, was disquieted by a movement which seemed to work outside the limits of the “Law,” as written by the Prophet. The work done by the new political power in Turkey appealed strongly to the great mass of the people in Western Europe, to those who had no experience of the East and its mysterious ways. The reformers, after years of strenuous effort, years spent in exile, broke in upon Abdul Hamid’s plans for maintaining Turkish ascendancy when Niazi Bey raised the standard of revolt in 1908, and threatened to march on Constantinople with the Second and Third Army Corps. Abdul Hamid yielded to pressure, and ordered the election of a Chamber of Deputies, at the same time encouraging a counter-revolution in his capital. This movement was led by Kiamil Pasha, the Grand Vizier then (as he is again at present), against the Committee of Union and Progress. The reformers proved too strong, and Kiamil Pasha was forced to resign; he was succeeded by Hilmi Pasha, formerly Commissioner of Macedonia. The acts of the Committee of Union and Progress began to bear fruit at once, and of a nature unexpected by those enthusiasts who had only the idea of a great Liberal Empire under a constitutional Sultan before their eyes, otherwise blind to side issues. But these side issues grew and crystallized into a segregation of the non-Islamic sections of the population, who felt more than ever justified in insisting on their own respective nationality. An early disagreement arose between the Committee of Union and Progress and the Liberal Union, a body called into being to represent the Christian electorate. The murder of Hussein Fehmi, an Albanian editor of the Union’s official organ, provoked his compatriots among the troops in Constantinople to action against the Committee of Union and Progress; mutinous soldiers seized the Parliament House and telegraph offices, while delegates from the Liberal Union suggested entering into negotiations with the other party. In the meantime Abdul Hamid had pardoned the mutineers, and this gave the Committee sufficient excuse for considering the revolt as reactionary; the Committee were well aware that their new regime could not succeed while the Sultan seemed to favour reaction. An army under Mahmoud Shevket marched on Constantinople, invested the capital, occupied it after some fighting, and ordered the National Assembly to depose Abdul Hamid, electing his younger brother to succeed as Mohammed V.
In itself, the deposition of a Sultan by a revolted section of the Army was nothing new in the annals of Ottoman history; it had occurred frequently, but was generally understood to have been an expression of the “Will of Allah.” “The Will of the People” was made responsible for the effects of the last revolution, and none were more bewildered than the bulk of the Turkish people themselves when this reasoning was explained to them. The Effendi class, the gentry, as it were, many of them men of intelligence, were as a whole by no means enamoured of the Committee of Union and Progress and its ways, knowing well how little the Turkish people were prepared for violent reforms. The people themselves seem to have quite failed to enter into the spirit of the new era; they missed the religious note; no mention was made of Allah, in fact, the professed agnosticism of some less cautious reformers led them to suggest that Allah had nothing to do with the business.
Then again, Christians, even Armenians, were to be looked upon as equals, treated as such, whereas every one knew that they had to submit, as becomes the vanquished, thus duly acknowledging the Turk as their superiors. Then a new word, besides the unintelligible “Vatan,” was being used to describe the governing power, “Constitution,” “Meshrutiet,” which many took to be a new, strange name for the succeeding Sultan. The election of delegates did not meet with thorough approval; some considered that it raised individuals above the mass of Moslems, who are all equal in the sight of the Prophet, others could not understand why an assembly was necessary to voice the Sultan’s “Irade” (in its original meaning, intention), and, again, there were those who thought of Parliament as a plaything of the Sultan’s, and justified for that reason only.
In the meantime enthusiastic Western nations, especially those who consider representative government the panacea for all social ills, because their own genius had evolved the system, loudly acclaimed the Young Turks as saviours of their country, as apostles of freedom, as heroes, and most members of the reform party gladly accepted this interpretation of their somewhat confused mentality. If you are called a hero you are very likely to believe it, even if it robs you of your proper sense of proportion. This happened to the Young Turks collectively. The promised reforms had never been demanded by the bulk of the Turkish people, who therefore had no standpoint from which to gauge the results of reforms; they supposed that everything was to be free, amongst others, railway travelling, and I have heard of Turks invading a first-class compartment, and not only declining to pay their fare, but objecting to Christians riding in the same coach.