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This is the Ottoman pretension. Egypt, rid of the Osmanli, and India, where he never ruled, have kept their ancient wealth of harvests and population, and have man-power to spare for the reclamation of the Sawâd.
As an Asiatic power, however, exerting temporal sway over some eighteen million bodies and religious influence over many times more souls, the Osmanli caliph might command a place in the sun. The result belied these hopes. Abdul Hamid's failure was owed in the main to facts independent of his personality or statecraft.
In the innocence of an unsophisticated nature, and a feeling of genuine sympathy for their position, I propose collecting these scattered groups of neglected females together and giving an exhibition for their especial benefit, but the men evidently regard the idea of going to any trouble out of consideration for them as quite ridiculous; indeed, I am inclined to think they regard it as evidence that I am nothing less than a gay Lothario, who is betraying altogether too much interest in their women; for the old school Osmanli encompasses those hapless mortals about with a green wall of jealousy, and regards with disapproval, even so much as a glance in their direction.
It is impossible to believe that the Greek Empire, however buttressed and protected by foreign powers, could ever have reconstituted itself after falling so low as it fell in the fourteenth century and as the Osmanli Empire fell in the eighteenth; and it is clear that the latter must still have possessed latent springs of vitality, deficient in the former. What can these have been?
"Of ten men," he used to say, quoting an Osmanli proverb, "nine are women." Behind his bed hung a map of Africa, and over that a motto in Arabic which meant: "All things pass." This saying he used to observe, was always a consolation to him. If he had been eager for money, it was only for what money would buy. He wanted it because it would enable him to do greater work.
There is no good frontier inland for such an enclave. It could hardly be held without the rest of westernmost Asia, from Caria to the Dardanelles, and in this region the great majority of the population is Moslem of old stocks, devotedly attached both to their faith and to the Osmanli tradition. The present writer, however, is not among the prophets.
To judge how far the shrinkage of the Osmanli European empire has been compensated by expansion of its Asiatic, one has only to compare the political state of Kurdistan, as it was at the end of the eighteenth century, and as it has been in our own time.
The kaváss is a very important functionary in Constantinople, and, though his office is lucrative, it is no sinecure. In former times the appearance of Franks in the streets of Constantinople was very likely to cause disturbance. Those were the great days of Turkey, when the Osmanli was master of the East, and regarded himself as the master of the world.
Secure from destruction by any foes but those of his own household, as none knew better than he, the reigning Osmanli was scheming to regain the independence and dignity of his forefathers.
The free and equal Osmanlis were all to take their cue from men of the Byzantine sort which the European provinces, and especially the city of Constantinople, breed. After the revolution, nothing in Turkey struck one so much as the apparition on the top of things everywhere of a type of Osmanli who has the characteristic qualities of the Levantine Greek.
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