He was well aware that the Turkish people only comprised some forty per
cent, of the population of the Turkish Empire: numerically they were
weaker than the alien peoples who composed the rest of it. Something had
to be done to bring the governing Power up to such a proportionate
strength as should secure its supremacy, and the most convenient plan
was to weaken the alien elements. The scheme, though yet inchoate, had
been tried with success in the case of the Bulgarians and Greeks, and to
test it further he stirred up Albanians against the inhabitants of Old
Servia with gratifying results. They weakened each other, and he further
weakened them both by the employment of Turkish troops in Macedonia to
quell the disturbances which he had himself fomented. There were
massacres and atrocities, and no more trouble just then from Macedonia.
Having thus tested his plan and found no flaw in it, he settled to adopt
it. But European combinations did not really much interest him, for he
was aware that the Great Powers, to whose sacred Balance he owed the
permanence of his throne, would not tolerate interference with European
peoples, and he turned his attention to Asia Minor. There were
excrescences there which he could not absorb, but which might be
destroyed. He could use the knife on living tissues which the impaired
digestion of the Ottoman Empire could not assimilate. So he hit on this
fresh scheme, which his hellish cunning devised with a matchless sense
of the adaptation of the means to the end, and he created (though he did
not live to perfect) a new policy that reversed the traditions of five
hundred years. That is no light task to undertake, and when we consider
that since his deposition, now nine years ago, that policy has reaped
results undreamed of perhaps by him, we can see how far-sighted his
cunning was. To-day it is being followed out by the very combination
that deposed him; his aims have been fully justified, and for that
precise reason we are right to classify him among the abhorred of