Despite the good intentions of Abdul Aziz himself—as sincere as can be credited to a disordered brain—-and despite more than one minister of outstanding ability, reform and almost everything else in the empire went to the bad in this unhappy reign. The administration settled down to lifeless routine and lapsed into corruption: the national army was starved: the depreciation of the currency grew worse as the revenue declined and the sultan’s household and personal extravagance increased. Encouraged by the inertia of the imperial Government, the Christians of the European provinces waxed bold. Though Montenegro was severely handled for contumacy, the Serbs were able to cover their penultimate stage towards freedom by forcing in 1867 the withdrawal of the last Ottoman garrisons from their fortresses. Krete stood at bay for three years and all but won her liberty. Bosnia rose in arms, but divided against herself. Pregnant with graver trouble than these, Bulgaria showed signs of waking from long sleep. In 1870 she obtained recognition as a nationality in the Ottoman Empire, her Church being detached from the control of the Oecumenical Patriarch of the Greeks and placed under an Exarch. Presently, her peasantry growing ever more restive, passed from protest to revolt against the Circassian refugee-colonists with whom the Porte was flooding the land. The sultan, in an evil hour, for lack of trained troops, let loose irregulars on the villages, and the Bulgarian atrocities, which they committed in 1875, sowed a fatal harvest for his successor to reap. His own time was almost fulfilled. The following spring a dozen high officials, with the assent of the Sheikh-ul-Islam and the active dissent of no one, took Abdul Aziz from his throne to a prison, wherein two days later he perished, probably by his own hand. A puppet reigned three months as Murad V, and then, at the bidding of the same king-makers whom his uncle had obeyed, left the throne free for his brother Abdul Hamid, a man of affairs and ability, who was to be the most conspicuous, or rather, the most notorious Osmanli sultan since Suleiman. 6 _Relapse_ The new sultan, who had not expected his throne, found his realm in perilous case. Nominally sovereign and a member of the Concert of Europe, he was in reality a semi-neutralized dependant, existing, as an undischarged bankrupt, on sufferance of the powers. Should the Concert be dissolved, or even divided, and any one of its members be left free to foreclose its Ottoman mortgages, the empire would be at an end. Internally it was in many parts in open revolt, in all the rest stagnant and slowly rotting. The thrice-foiled claimant to its succession, who six years before had denounced the Black Sea clause of the Treaty of Paris and so freed its hands for offence, was manifestly preparing a fresh assault. Something drastic must be done; but what?