We were not likely to make that mistake again. We were no more to be deluded with words than the {157} Sultan was to be coerced with adjectives. We looked at facts--hard, disagreeable, ugly though they were--and adjusted our policy accordingly. The first fact was the Sultan. In 1896 England called him "the Assassin" and the "accursed." Mr. William Watson even went to the length of referring to him as "Abdul the Damned." But England, alas! saved him in 1878, and she gloried in the deed. When Lord Salisbury reported from Berlin the net result of English diplomacy at the Congress, he boasted that it had "restored, with due security for good government (!), a very large territory to the Government of the Sultan," and that the alterations made in our Treaty of San Stéfano tended "powerfully to secure from external assault the stability and independence of his Empire." It is difficult to repress a bitter smile when recalling the positive assurances which were given to Europe by Lord Beaconsfield as to the "angelic" character of Abdul Hamid, who was then England's _protégé_, England's ally, England's favourite. Russia maintained that no Sultan could be trusted to protect Christian subjects, and Mr. Gladstone concurred. Everywhere there must be a guarantee. Either the populations must be freed entirely from his rule or an outside Power must superintend and enforce the execution of reforms. England met this with a flat refusal. She made it the first object of her policy to restore the direct uncontrolled authority of the Sultan over as wide a territory as possible, and Lord Beaconsfield exulted in the fatal success of that policy for many reasons, but especially for one, which most of my English {158} friends seem to have forgotten, but which Russians, being the sufferers, do not forget so easily. Lord Beaconsfield was sure he had done right because the Sultan was such "a good man." On his return from Berlin, in his speech at the Mansion House (July 27, 1898) he gave the following testimonial to Abdul Hamid--the hero of to-day: "I look to the individual character of that human being as of vast importance. He is a man whose every impulse is good. However great may be the difficulties he has to encounter, however various may be the influences that may ultimately control him, his impulses are always good. He is not a tyrant, he is not dissolute. He is not a bigot. He is not corrupt." The comments of the Young Turks on this pronouncement would be interesting.