About the beginning of the unfortunate reign of the present Sultan, the reformers found so many adherents among the educated classes of the people, as well as in the army, that Abd-ul-Hamid thought it imperative to promise to Midhat Pasha, the chief reformer, that immediately after his coronation he would proclaim constitutional law, and sanction an assembly of the representatives of the various communities of the empire. He did as he said, but he was only waiting for an opportunity of making away with the leaders of the constitutional movement and of re-establishing the personal rule of the sovereign. The war with Russia in 1877 gave him his opportunity; as the Turkish people were suffering from the terrible results of the war, they were not in a position to forestall the evil designs of Yildiz Kiosk, and to make the friends of Turkey in Western Europe understand that the only way of preserving the integrity of the empire was through the formation of a responsible constitutional government. The short-lived Ottoman constitution, which Abd-ul-Hamid destroyed, was therefore the work of the Young-Turkish Party, who aimed at the regeneration of their country by founding a "reasonable representative Government," to quote a phrase of the late Mr Gladstone, and was not merely a ruse on the part of the Sultan whereby "he might throw dust into the eyes of the Western Powers," as the irreconcilable enemies of the Ottoman empire interpreted it Mr Gladstone and his political friends, however, never really sympathised with the attempts to establish such a government in Turkey. The late Duke of Argyll said, in one of his books on Eastern matters, "We in England laughed at their constitution." As a matter of fact, these politicians of England wanted reforms only for the Christian subjects of the empire.