The Sultan had rid himself of all the chief friends of liberty immediately after his accession to the throne, but, cautious and fearful by nature, he took no further immediate steps to impose absolute despotism upon his people. Mainly with the object of hoodwinking England and winning her good-will at the critical period preceding the outbreak of the war with Russia, he proclaimed the Constitution of Midhat Pasha, and a Turkish Parliament was allowed to meet. The Sultan imposed his will upon the Parliament and reduced it to impotence; but there were many patriotic deputies who spoke their minds freely and defied the monarch’s wrath. At last, in February, 1878, shortly before the conclusion of the treaty of peace with Russia at St. Stephano, the Sultan dissolved both Houses, and, with pretended reluctance, suspended the Constitution. He next proceeded to deprive the Sublime Porte of all power and to make the Palace supreme. The ministers became mere puppets, whose submission was bought by the license that was allowed to them to embezzle the public funds. The control of the army and navy, of foreign affairs, of the finances of the Empire, every branch of the administration, the appointment of every official were in the hands of the Sovereign and his corrupt Camarilla. Having a pampered Prætorian Guard to enforce his will, he held Constantinople under martial law. It was a reign of terror; he spared none who were not for him. From the dissolution of Turkey’s first Parliament in 1878 until the proclamation of the Constitution in 1908 Turkey was oppressed by one of the most demoralising and destructive tyrannies that the world has known. For the Ottoman Empire those thirty years were the most unhappy and disastrous of its long history. CHAPTER IV _THE SPREAD OF CORRUPTION_ The sultan’s policy was directed by a narrow fanaticism. It is possible that he sincerely believed that a cruel despotism was the best rule for Turkey. He hated the Christians, and it was his ambition to realise the dream of the Pan-Islamites, to gather together round himself as the Caliph all the followers of the faith of whatever race, so as to form a strong political-religious confederation of Moslems that should keep in check the aggressions of Europe and liberate Mussulman peoples now subject to the Christians. It was his aim, too, to withdraw all such rights as his predecessors had granted to the Christian subjects of Turkey and to revoke the irritating privileges which the Capitulations had given to foreigners within Turkish territory—not in themselves ignoble designs, but which were prosecuted by such ignoble methods as nearly to destroy instead of to strengthen the Moslem supremacy in Turkey.