It was partly Ottoman fault, partly the fault of circumstances beyond Ottoman control, that this district had become a scandal and a reproach. In the days of Osmanli greatness Macedonia had been neglected in favour of provinces to the north, which were richer and more nearly related to the ways into central Europe. When more attention began to be paid to it by the Government, it had already become a cockpit for the new-born Christian nationalities, which had been developed on the north, east, and south. These were using every weapon, material and spiritual, to secure preponderance in its society, and had created chronic disorder which the Ottoman administration now weakly encouraged to save itself trouble, now violently dragooned. Already the powers had not only proposed autonomy for it, but begun to control its police and its finance. This was the last straw. The public opinion which had slowly been forming for thirty years gained the army, and Midhat’s seed came to fruit. By an irony of fate Macedonia not only supplied the spectacle which exasperated the army to revolt, but by its very disorder made the preparation of that revolt possible; for it was due to local limitations of Ottoman sovereignty that the chief promoters of revolution were able to conspire in safety. By another irony, two of the few progressive measures ever encouraged by Abdul Hamid contributed to his undoing. If he had not sent young officers to be trained abroad, the army, the one Ottoman institution never allowed wholly to decay, would have remained outside the conspiracy. If he had never promoted the construction of railways, as he began to do after 1897, the Salonika army could have had no such influence on affairs in Constantinople as it exerted in 1908 and again in 1909. As it was, the sultan, at a mandate from Resna in Macedonia, re-enacted Midhat’s Constitution, and, a year later, saw an army from Salonika arrive to uphold that Constitution against the reaction he had fostered, and to send him, dethroned and captive, to the place whence itself had come. 7 _Revolution_ Looking back on this revolution across seven years of its consequences, we see plainly enough that it was inspired far less by desire for humane progress than by shame of Osmanli military decline. The ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ programme which its authors put forward (a civilian minority among them, sincerely enough), Europe accepted, and the populace of the empire acted upon for a moment, did not express the motive of the movement or eventually guide its course. The essence of that movement was militant nationalism. The empire was to be regenerated, not by humanizing it but by Ottomanizing it. The Osmanli, the man of the sword, was the type to which all others, who wished to be of the nation, were to conform. Such as did not so wish must be eliminated by the rest.