Until documents of a contrary tenor come to light, we may say with some approach to certainty that the responsibility for the war of 1877-78 rests with the Sultan of Turkey and with those who indirectly encouraged him to set at naught the counsels of the Powers. Lord Derby and Lord Salisbury had of late plainly warned him of the consequences of his stubbornness; but the influence of the British embassy at Constantinople and of the Turkish ambassador in London seems greatly to have weakened the force of those warnings. It must always be remembered that the Turk will concede religious freedom and civic equality to the "Giaours" only under overwhelming pressure. In such a case he mutters "Kismet" ("It is fate"), and gives way; but the least sign of weakness or wavering on the part of the Powers awakens his fanatical scruples. Then his devotion to the Koran forbids any surrender. History has afforded several proofs of this, from the time of the Battle of Navarino (1827) to that of the intervention of the Western Powers on behalf of the slaughtered and harried Christians of the Lebanon (1860). Unfortunately Abdul Hamid had now come to regard the Concert of the Powers as a "loud-sounding nothing." With the usual bent of a mean and narrow nature he detected nothing but hypocrisy in its lofty professions, and self-seeking in its philanthropic aims, together with a treacherous desire among influential persons to make the whole scheme miscarry. Accordingly he fell back on the boundless fund of inertia, with which a devout Moslem ruler blocks the way to western reforms. A competent observer has finely remarked that the Turk never changes; his neighbours, his frontiers, his statute-books may change, but his ideas and his practice remain always the same. He will not be interfered with; he will not improve[123]. To this statement we must add that only under dire necessity will he allow his Christian subjects to improve. The history of the Eastern Question may be summed up in these assertions. [Footnote 123: _Turkey in Europe_, by Odysseus, p. 139.] Abdul Hamid II. is the incarnation of the reactionary forces which have brought ruin to Turkey and misery to her Christian subjects. He owed his crown to a recrudescence of Moslem fanaticism; and his reign has illustrated the unsuspected strength and ferocity of his race and creed in face of the uncertain tones in which Christendom has spoken since the spring of the year 1876. The reasons which prompted his defiance a year later were revealed by his former Grand Vizier, Midhat Pasha, in an article in the _Nineteenth Century_ for June 1877. The following passage is especially illuminating:--