It used to be said about 1880 by those who were in a position to know best—no one has ever been in a position to have quite certain knowledge in Constantinople—that the sultan was a Dervish of the class called vulgarly the Howling, and that when (as was often the case) the ministers of state summoned to a council had to wait hour after hour for the sultan to appear, he was in an inner room with a circle of other Dervishes loudly invoking the name of Allah and working up the ecstatic condition in which it should be revealed whether and when he should enter the council. I do not doubt that the great idea of appealing to the world of Islam was struck out in some such moment of ecstasy. At the same time, Abd-ul-Hamid has had a good deal to gain from the success of this policy.
Europeans who have been admitted to meet the sultan in direct intercourse are almost all agreed that he possesses great personal charm and a gracious, winning courtesy. On the other hand, ministers of state used to speak with deep feeling of the insults and abuse poured on any, even the highest, who had the misfortune to express an opinion that did not agree with his wishes.
An official in the palace described very frankly—it is wonderful how freely and frankly Turks express their opinion; this seems inseparable from the Turkish nature—to an Englishman whom he knew well the situation in the palace at the time when an ultimatum had been presented, and before it was known what would be the issue; how the sultan was flattered up to believe that he had only to go into Egypt and resume possession, and that the English would never resist. The Englishman remarked, “But you know better than that, and of course you give better advice when the sultan asks your opinion.” “God forbid,” was the reply, “that I should say to the sultan anything except what he wishes me to say. No! when he asks me, I reply that of course the master of a million of soldiers has only to enter Egypt and it is his. And it is not for nothing that I do this. The sultan is pleased with me, and signs some paper that I have brought him, and it may be worth 10,000 piastres to me.”
The sultan hates England with a permanent and ineradicable hatred; this feeling dominates and colors his whole policy; it is only for that reason that he tolerates Germany, which otherwise he dislikes. England has always been the friend of the Reform party in Turkey; and the sultan is the great reactionary who has trodden the Reform party in the dust. But, worse than that, England, pretending to help Turkey, took possession of Cyprus, nominally to enable her to guarantee Turkey against Russia in Asia Minor, but really (as it seems to the Turks) by pure theft, because all pretence of using Cyprus as a basis of operations against Russia in Asia Minor was abandoned in 1880, and yet England kept Cyprus.
Now to the sultan the sting lies in this, that Cyprus was his private appanage, and not part of the State. The whole revenue of Cyprus went to the sultan’s privy purse. But worse still: at first the English paid over the Cypriote revenue, about £95,000 a year, to Constantinople, but after the Gladstonian government came into power, in 1880, this revenue was diverted to pay interest on the Turkish debt, emptying the sultan’s private purse into the lap of the European bondholders.
The sultan, therefore, welcomed the German intervention, for the Germans encouraged him to govern as he pleased. They even persuaded him that railways were necessary for military efficiency, and showed that the Hedjaz Railway must be the foundation of his khalifate. Yet the railways that he has made, and the Moslem schools that he has founded, are the surest means of educating his people, and education is the inevitable enemy of autocracy.
The German policy has seemed to be very successful in promoting German interests in Turkey. But, after all, the ground fact is that the German policy was an opportunist policy, and the English policy, ignorant and ill-managed as it has been, was founded on deeper principles. History will record hereafter that the former proved a failure, and that the hatred of a people more than compensated for the favor of an evanescent tyrant. The same struggle is going on in Turkey as in Russia—the educated part of the people on one side, a tyranny resting on bureaucracy and obscurantism on the other. Whatever may be the faults of Abd-ul-Hamid, his worst enemy must place him on an immensely higher level than the czar on any point of view, humanitarian or patriotic, personal or political. But for England in Turkey the greatest danger is that she be tempted to Germanize her policy from experience of the apparent German success. Her policy has been, on the whole, the wiser, but it has been carried out with an ignorance of Turkish facts that is appalling.