Indeed the usurpation of the Caliph-title by the Ottoman Sultans had only this significance, that in their political period of splendour they wished to have it established beyond dispute that no other Moslim prince could compare with them in importance. This could in no wise be more aptly done than by adding to all their high-sounding Persian and Turkish titles the name of the most exalted office which had ever existed in Islâm. To their power this nominal title of Caliph has never added anything; they ruled only what their armies had conquered and outside those limits they did not exert the slightest influence. The Turkish sword soon lost its edge; long before the policy of the great European powers gnawed off piece after piece from the realm of the Ottomans, several provinces had developed into separate feudal dominions under hereditary dynasties. Since Turkey, entirely dependent in its policy upon non-Mohammedan powers, can only claim about five per cent. of the Mohammedans of the world as its subjects, it would sound highly ridiculous to have the Sultan of that realm called “Lieutenant of God’s Messenger, Supreme Commander of the Faithful,” if also outside Turkey one were not used to much traditional nonsense in princely titles. It is just in this last century that the Turks, through a concourse of circumstances, have sometimes succeeded in coining some small advantage out of this doubtfully legal, now meaningless title. Means of communication increased a thousandfold have now brought into contact Mohammedan nations which formerly knew nothing, or hardly anything, about each other’s existence. The approximately 230,000,000 of Mohammedans living under non-Moslim rule mostly do not possess sufficient historical remembrance to understand that the change in administration has been an improvement for them. They see the political past of Islâm only through the veil of legend, and when the present gives occasion for grievances and objections--and where are these lacking?--they are rather prone to believe that all their complaints would be cured, if only the Commander of the Faithful could take their interests in hand. Of the maladministration under which the real subjects of the Sultan of Turkey are labouring, they hear little and experience nothing. And the Sultan, who has been the worst in this respect, until in 1909 he was deposed and exiled by his subjects, has worked more zealously and more successfully than any of his predecessors for the dissemination amongst the Mohammedans of the false imaginations concerning the Caliphate. His wily but short-sighted policy, which brought his own empire ever nearer to its fall, made him seek solace for many a failure in Panislamic intrigues, staged by unscrupulous but mostly ignorant and blundering confederates, who showed the credulous the ideal picture of a Caliph, assuring them that it was a good likeness of Abdulhamîd.