Thus, after the Russo-Turkish war, the country was not able to give material support to the Reform 4 Party,' while, on the other hand, this party received no effective support from the well-wishers of the Ottoman empire in England. The Yildiz junta took full advantage of this, made the constitution a dead letter, got rid of the most powerful and most honest reformers by sending them as governors or mere exiles to distant provinces, and established a bureaucratic authority of the most intolerably oppressive kind, the misrule of which has caused the Ottoman empire irreparable harm. In the hope of preventing the formation of an opposition party, Abd-ul-Hamid began to stir up the old religious and racial hatreds, which were then almost dead, among the various nationalities of the empire, and to crush every sort of industrial energy and collective enterprise of the people. He further threatened private property, more especially of the reform adherents, with confiscation on the slightest excuse. In spite, however, of fiendish and systematic persecution of the reformers and their followers, the Sultan has never succeeded in entirely stamping out the reform movement He was too late in his attempt to suppress education, and the spread of Western learning among the Turkish people has brought about the dissemination of the ideas of Western Europe as to the legitimate liberty of the people and the responsibility of the government; hence, discontent among the more thoughtful of the community has steadily gone on increasing.
About the beginning of the Armenian revolt there was an energetic revival of the reform agitation. The would-be reformers earnestly tried to upset the misrule of the Sultan Abd-ul-Hamid. They wanted a brave Sultan to rule over a brave people; they wanted an honest sovereign, not an intriguer, clever enough when his personal safety is concerned, but otherwise a lunatic, who has shut himself up in his fortified palace for the last six-and-twenty years; they wanted a worthy Caliph, who would impress the Mohammedan world with the fact that as a Mohammedan power Turkey had a respectable position among the civilised powers of Europe; they wanted a responsible Turkish Ministry, not a cosmopolitan clique of adventurers, whose misrule brought the very name of the Turkish nation into contempt. Persecution of some twenty-five thousand Young-Turkish adherents did not prove sufficient to suppress this movement. Therefore the Sultan had to devise further ingenious means for bringing it to naught Many of his spies fled to Europe as though they were Young-Turks, and joined the different Young-Turkish committees; they reported secretly everything they discovered concerning them to the Sultan, and tried to sow discord among the members. As most of the fugitives depended for their livelihood on their resources in Turkey, the Sultan succeeded in driving them into the utmost destitution by cutting off these resources. Meanwhile his emissaries came forward with large sums of money and with promises of appointments in Government offices, to induce the refugees to return to Turkey. Some of them accepted the pecuniary assistance of his benevolent Majesty, and therefore lost the sympathy of the Turkish people. Certain office-seekers and concession-hunters, some of whom were not Turks at all, pretending to be Turkish reformers, published seditious papers in London and elsewhere in order to blackmail the Sultan, and in this way brought shame upon the honour of the Young-Turks.