Turkey’s situation, therefore, in general terms has become this. With the dissolution of the Concert of Europe the Ottoman Empire has lost what had been for a century its chief security for continued existence. Its fate now depends on that of two European powers which are at war with the rest of the former Concert. Among the last named are Turkey’s two principal creditors, holding together about seventy-five per cent. of her public debt. In the event of the defeat of her friends, these creditors will be free to foreclose, the debtor being certainly in no position to meet her obligations. Allied with Christian powers, the Osmanli caliph has proved no more able than his predecessors to unite Islam in his defence; but, for what his title is worth, Mohammed V is still caliph, no rival claim having been put forward. The loyalty of the empire remains where it was, pending victory or defeat, the provinces being slow to realize, and still slower to resent, the disastrous economic state to which the war is reducing them. The present struggle may leave the Osmanli Empire in one of three situations: (1) member of a victorious alliance, reinforced, enlarged, and lightened of financial burdens, as the wages of its sin; (2) member of a defeated alliance, bound to pay the price of blood in loss of territory, or independence, or even existence; (3) party to a compromise under which its territorial empire might conceivably remain Ottoman, but under even stricter European tutelage than of old. The first alternative it would be idle to discuss, for the result of conditions so novel are impossible to foresee. Nor, indeed, when immediate events are so doubtful an at the present moment, is it profitable to attempt to forecast the ultimate result of any of the alternatives. Should, however, either the second or the third become fact, certain general truths about the Osmanlis will govern the consequences; and these must be borne in mind by any in whose hands the disposal of the empire may lie. The influence of the Osmanlis in their empire to-day resides in three things: first, in their possession of Constantinople; second, in the sultan’s caliphate and his guardianship of the holy cities of Islam; third, in certain qualities of Osmanli character, notably ‘will to power’ and courage in the field. What Constantinople means for the Osmanlis is implied in that name _Roum_ by which the western dominions of the Turks have been known ever since the Seljuks won Asia Minor. Apart from the prestige of their own early conquests, the Osmanlis inherited, and in a measure retain in the Near East, the traditional prestige of the greatest empire which ever held it. They stand not only for their own past but also for whatever still lives of the prestige of Rome. Theirs is still the repute of the imperial people _par excellence_, chosen and called to rule.