The eventual product of Mahmud’s persistency was the ‘Turkey’ we have seen in our own time—that Turkey irretrievably Asiatic in spirit under a semi-European system of administration, which has governed despotically in the interests of one creed and one class, with slipshod, makeshift methods, but has always governed, and little by little has extended its range. Knowing its imperfections and its weakness, we have watched with amazement its hand feeling forward none the less towards one remote frontier district after another, painfully but surely getting its grip, and at last closing on Turcoman chiefs and Kurdish beys, first in the Anatolian and Cilician hills, then in the mountains of Armenia, finally in the wildest Alps of the Persian borderland. We have marked its stealthy movement into the steppes and deserts of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Arabia— now drawn back, now pushed farther till it has reached and held regions over which Mahmud could claim nothing but a suzerainty in name. To judge how far the shrinkage of the Osmanli European empire has been compensated by expansion of its Asiatic, one has only to compare the political state of Kurdistan, as it was at the end of the eighteenth century, and as it has been in our own time. It is impossible to believe that the Greek Empire, however buttressed and protected by foreign powers, could ever have reconstituted itself after falling so low as it fell in the fourteenth century and as the Osmanli Empire fell in the eighteenth; and it is clear that the latter must still have possessed latent springs of vitality, deficient in the former. What can these have been? It is worth while to try to answer this question at the present juncture, since those springs, if they existed a hundred years ago, can hardly now be dry. In the first place it had its predominant creed. This had acted as Islam acts everywhere, as a very strong social bond, uniting the vast majority of subjects in all districts except certain parts of the European empire, in instinctive loyalty to the person of the padishah, whatever might be felt about his government. Thus had it acted with special efficacy in Asia Minor, whose inhabitants the Osmanli emperors, unlike the Greek, had always been at some pains to attach to themselves. The sultan, therefore, could still count on general support from the population of his empire’s heart, and had at his disposal the resources of a country which no administration, however improvident or malign, has ever been able to exhaust. In the second place the Osmanli ‘Turks’, however fallen away from the virtues of their ancestors, had not lost either ‘the will to power’ or their capacity for governing under military law. If they had never succeeded in learning to rule as civilians they had not forgotten how to rule as soldiers.