Thus, after the Russo-Turkish war, the country was not able to give material support to the Reform 4 Party,' while, on the other hand, this party received no effective support from the well-wishers of the Ottoman empire in England. The Yildiz junta took full advantage of this, made the constitution a dead letter, got rid of the most powerful and most honest reformers by sending them as governors or mere exiles to distant provinces, and established a bureaucratic authority of the most intolerably oppressive kind, the misrule of which has caused the Ottoman empire irreparable harm. In the hope of preventing the formation of an opposition party, Abd-ul-Hamid began to stir up the old religious and racial hatreds, which were then almost dead, among the various nationalities of the empire, and to crush every sort of industrial energy and collective enterprise of the people. He further threatened private property, more especially of the reform adherents, with confiscation on the slightest excuse. In spite, however, of fiendish and systematic persecution of the reformers and their followers, the Sultan has never succeeded in entirely stamping out the reform movement He was too late in his attempt to suppress education, and the spread of Western learning among the Turkish people has brought about the dissemination of the ideas of Western Europe as to the legitimate liberty of the people and the responsibility of the government; hence, discontent among the more thoughtful of the community has steadily gone on increasing.