But it does not suffice to decree great changes; it is in the endeavour to reduce them to practice that the chief difficulty arises. And no great wonder if in a country like Turkey, where vested interests had grown around the old order of things; where conservative prejudices, as in every country in the world, obstruct the path of reform; where trained civil servants did not exist but had to be created, that the execution of these important and all‐embracing reforms should not have taken place by decree as by a magician’s wand, but required time and patience for their realisation. Events, too, were taking place in Europe which were destined to change the aspect of things and divert the minds of statesmen from internal organisation to the necessities of defending the existence of the national independence. The revolutionary movement of 1848–1849 in Europe afforded a little respite to a country outside the sphere of this movement, and it was just at this disturbed period of the rest of Europe that Turkey enjoyed the greatest peace and made the greatest progress in the work of re‐organisation. But scarcely had the revolutionary effervescence calmed down in Europe, and the fears connected with it been laid to rest, when the Emperor Nicholas—who had finally suppressed the Magyar insurrection and restored Hungary to the House of Hapsburg—turned his attention once more to Turkey, and resolved on decisive action. To suppose that the progress in organisation that was being effected in that country was not entirely unconnected with this determination would be only to deny that the arguments and reasons of State put forward by Pozzo di Borgo, in 1828, were operative in the mind of the Emperor Nicholas twenty years later: “When the Imperial Cabinet examines the question as to whether the moment had not arrived to take up arms against the Porte, some doubt might possibly have existed as to the urgency of such a measure in the minds of those who had not sufficiently meditated on the effects of the sanguinary reform (destruction of Janissaries) that the Ottoman ruler had just executed with such terrible force. Now, however, the experience that we have just had ought to enlist the sympathy of all in favour of the course that we have adopted. The Emperor has put the new Turkish system to the proof, and His Majesty has discovered in it a commencement of moral and physical organisation which it never possessed before. If the Sultan has been enabled to oppose to us a more spirited and regular resistance than before, whilst scarcely able to put together the elements of his new plan of reform and amelioration, how much the more formidable should we have found him if he had had the time to give it more solidity.”[5]