The Balkan States were left to solve the Macedonian problem by themselves. Their solution was the Treaty of Bukarest. The success of Servia in planting herself in the valley of the Vardar, and in occupying Monastir, is the result of the struggle of races in Macedonia. It is the direct, immediate cause of the European War of 1914.
CHAPTER XI
THE YOUNG TURK RÉGIME IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
No event during the first decade of the twentieth century was heralded throughout Europe with so great and so sincere interest and sympathy as the bloodless revolution of July 24, 1908, by which the régime of Abdul Hamid was overthrown and the constitution of 1876 resuscitated.
Although the world was unprepared for this event, it was not due to any sudden cause. For twenty years the leaven of liberalism had been working in the minds of the educated classes in the Ottoman Empire. Moslems, as well as Christians, had been in attendance in large numbers at the American, French, Italian, and German schools in Turkey, and had gone abroad to complete their education. Just as in Italy and in Germany, Young Turkey had come into existence through contact with those free institutions in the outside world which other races enjoyed, had been emancipated from superstition and from the stultifying influences of religious formalism, and had grown, in the army, to numbers sufficient to dictate the policy of the Government.
From the beginning of his reign, Abdul Hamid had done all in his power to prevent the growth of the liberal spirit. The result of thirty years, in so far as civil officials of the Government were concerned, had been the stamping out of every man who combined ability with patriotism and devotion to an ideal. The best elements had taken the road to death, to imprisonment, or to exile, so that from the palace down to the humblest village, the Turkish civil service was composed of a set of men absolutely lacking in independence and in honour, and devoted to the master who ruled from Yildiz. But in the army, this same policy, though attempted, had not wholly succeeded. A portion at least of the officers received an education; many of them, indeed, had been sent abroad to Germany and to France in order to keep abreast with the development of military science, so essential to the very existence of Turkey. In the army, then, hundreds of officers of high character and high ideals were able to avoid the fate which had come to other educated Moslems in Turkey. They learned to love their country, and with that love came a sense of shame for the results of the despotism under which they existed. To have lived in Paris or in Berlin was enough to make them dissatisfied; to have visited Cairo or Alexandria, Sofia or Bukarest or Athens, and to have contrasted the conditions of life in these cities, recently their own, with Constantinople, Salonika, and Smyrna, was sufficient.
It is impossible in the limits of this book to tell how this bloodless revolution was planned by exiles abroad and officers at home. It was successful, as well as bloodless, because the army refused to obey the orders of the Sultan. To save his life and his throne, Abdul Hamid was compelled to resuscitate the constitution which he had granted, and then suppressed, at the beginning of his reign.
We who lived through those dream days of the beginning of the new régime will never forget the sense of joy of an emancipated people. The spy system was abolished, newspapers were allowed to tell the truth and express their own opinions, passports and teskeres (permissions to travel from one point to another within the Empire) were declared unnecessary, bakshish was refused at the custom house and police station. Moslem ulema and Christian clergy embraced each other in public, rode through the streets in triumph in the same carriages, and harangued the multitudes from the same platform in mosque and church. A new era of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, they said, had dawned for all the races in Turkey. The Sultan was the father, Turkey the fatherland, barriers and disabilities of creed and race had ceased to exist. It seemed incredible, but these scenes were really happening from the Adriatic to the Persian Gulf.
Optimism, hope for the future, was so strong that one had not the heart to express very loudly his belief that no real revolution was ever bloodless, that no real change in political and social life of the people could come in a single day or as a result of an official document. No one could think of anything else but the constitution, which had broken the chains for Moslem and Christian alike, the constitution which was going to restore Turkey to its lawful place among the nations of Europe, the constitution which was to heal the sick man and solve the question of the Orient. In Smyrna, in Constantinople, in Beirut, and in Asia Minor, I heard the same story over and over again. But there was always the misgiving, the apprehension for the future, from which the foreigner in Turkey is never free. It seemed too good to be true; it was too good to be true. It was against the logic of history. The most wonderful constitution that the world has ever known is that of England. It does not exist on paper; there is no need for a document. It is good, and it has endured, because it has been written in blood, in suffering, and in the agony of generations, on the pages of eight centuries of history. Could Turkey hope to be free in a day?