“In the beginning of December 1875, I was informed by one of Midhat’s partisans, a Pasha who had filled some of the highest offices of the State, that the object of his party was to obtain a ‘Constitution.’ This was more than a year before its promulgation, when it was declared to have been invented only to defeat the Conference then sitting at Constantinople.... A few days later Midhat himself called upon me and explained his views more fully than he had ever done before, though I was acquainted with their general tenor. The Empire, he said, was being rapidly brought to destruction; corruption had reached a pitch that it had never before attained; the service of the State was starved, while untold millions were poured into the Palace, and the provinces were being ruined by the uncontrolled exertions of governors who purchased their appointments at the Palace, and nothing could save the country but a complete change of system. The only remedy that he could perceive, lay, first, in securing a control over the sovereign by making the Ministers—and especially as regarded the finances—responsible to a national popular Assembly; and secondly in making this Assembly truly national, by doing away with all distinctions of classes and religions, and by placing the Christians on a footing of entire equality with the Mussulmans; thirdly, by decentralisation and by the establishment of provincial control over the governors. It must surely be admitted that these were enlightened and statesmanlike views, deserving of every encouragement.... He dwelt repeatedly on the value that the sympathy of the British nation would be to the reformers, and on the manner in which his countrymen were now looking to England as the example they hoped to follow. I told him in reply that I could not doubt that measures framed upon the lines he had laid down must command the approval and ensure the good wishes of every Englishman who, like myself, had faith in the advantages of constitutional checks upon arbitrary power. I gave him this assurance confidently and in good faith; for certainly the very last thing that I anticipated was that those who in this country make the greatest parade of their devotion to constitutional principles would be the first to heap contumely upon men who were trying to introduce it into theirs, and to hold up their proposals to ridicule....”