Its weakness lay in itself, for it was very loosely knit together, and
no bond, whether of blood or religion or tongue, bound to it the
assembly of Christian and Jewish and non-Moslem races of which it was so
largely composed. The Empire never grew (as, for instance, the British
Empire grew) by the emigration and settlement of the Osmanli stock in
the territories it absorbed: it never gave, it only took. From the
beginning right up to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it has
been a military despotism, imposing itself on unwilling and alien tribes
whom it drained of their blood, and then left in neglect until some
further levy was needed. None of its conquered peoples was ever given a
share in the government; they were left unorganised and, so to speak,
undigested elements under the Power which had forced them into
subjection, and one by one the whole of the European peoples included in
that uncemented tyranny have passed from under Turkish control. Turkey
in Europe has dwindled to a strip along the Bosporus to the Sea of
Marmora and the Dardanelles, Egypt has been lost, Tripoli also, and the
only force that, for the last hundred years has kept alive in Europe the
existence of that monstrous anachronism has been the strange political
phenomenon, now happily extinct, called the Balance of Power. No one of
the Great Powers, from fear of the complications that would ensue, could
risk the expulsion of the Turkish Government from Constantinople, and
there all through the nineteenth century it has been maintained lest the
Key of the Black Sea, which unlocked the bolts that barred Russia's
development into the Mediterranean, should lead to such a war as we are
now passing through. That policy, for the present, has utterly defeated
its own ends, for the key is in the pockets of Prussia. But all through
that century, though the Powers maintained Turkey there, they helped to
liberate, or saw liberate themselves, the various Christian kingdoms in
Europe over which at the beginning of the eighteenth century Turkey
exercised a military despotism. They weakened her in so far as they