est and blackest outrages upon
record in that [XIX] century." The War of 1877-78 accelerated the process
of the empire's dismemberment. No less than eleven million people were
emancipated from Turkish yoke. The Russian troops occupied Adrianople.
Serbia, Montenegro and Rumania proclaimed their independence. Bulgaria
became a self-governing state, tributary to the sultan. Cyprus and Egypt
were occupied. The French assumed a protectorate over Tunis. Eastern
Rumelia was ceded to Bulgaria. The wholesale massacres of Armenians,
involving directly and indirectly a hundred thousand souls, were but a
foretaste of the still more extensive bloodbaths to come in a later reign.
Bosnia and Herzegovina were lost to Austria. Bulgaria obtained her
independence. Universal contempt and hatred of an infamous sovereign,
shared alike by his Christian and Muslim subjects, finally culminated in a
revolution, swift and sweeping. The Committee of Young Turks secured from
the _Sh_ay_kh_u'l-Islam the condemnation of the sultan. Deserted and
friendless, execrated by his subjects, and despised by his fellow-rulers,
he was forced to abdicate, and was made a prisoner of state, thus ending a
reign "more disastrous in its immediate losses of territory and in the
certainty of others to follow, and more conspicuous for the deterioration
of the condition of his subjects, than that of any other of his
twenty-three degenerate predecessors since the death of Soliman the
Magnificent."

The end of so shameful a reign was but the beginning of a new era which,
however auspiciously hailed at first, was destined to witness the collapse
of the Ottoman ramshackle and worm-eaten state. Muhammad V, a brother of
'Abdu'l-Hamid II, an absolute nonentity, failed to improve the status of
his subjects. The follies of his government ultimately sealed the doom of
the empire. The War of 1914-18 provided the occasion. Military reverses
brought to a head the forces that were sapping its foundations. While the
war was still being fought the defection of the Sherif of Mecca and the
revolt of the Arabian provinces portended the convulsion which was to
seize the Turkish throne. The precipitate flight and complete destruction
of the army of Jamal Pa_sh_a, the commander-in-chief in Syria--he who had
sworn to raze to the ground, after his triumphant return from Egypt, the
Tomb of Baha'u'llah, and to publicly crucify the Center of His Covenant in
a public square of Constantinople--was th