by himself, and confirming the declaration that henceforth there would be no interference at any time or in any way with the working of the Constitution, which he made on the occasion of receiving the congratulations of the Foreign Representatives on the restoration of the Constitution of 1876, it ordains that :

1. All Ottoman subjects, without distinction of race and origin, shall enjoy personal liberty, and be equal as regards rights and responsibilities.

2. Nobody shall be questioned, arrested, imprisoned, or punished in any manner without legal grounds.

3. Extraordinary Courts shall be prohibited, and it shall be forbidden to summon any person outside the Department of the Competent Tribunal.

4. The domicile of all persons is inviolable, and it shall not be permissible to enter a house or to keep any place of abode under observation, otherwise than in conformity with the provisions of the law.

5. Officials, noble or otherwise, shall not prosecute any person otherwise than as specified by law.

6. All subjects of the Sultan shall have the right to reside where they wish, and to associate with whom they desire.

7. The censorship of the Press shall be abolished, letters and newspapers shall not be intercepted in course of post, and offences of the Press shall be investigated by ordinary

courts.

8. Education shall be free.

9. Officials shall be responsible to the laws, and they shall not be obliged to obey orders contrary to law. No one shall be appointed to a post against his will.

Ministers, and

He shall also

10. The Grand Vizier shall choose the submit them to the Sultan for his sanction. choose the diplomatic agents, the valis and the members of the Council of State, with the assent of the Minister of Foreign Affairs and of the Minister of the Interior and of the President of the Council of State respectively, as far as it concerns them.

Articles 11 and 12 determine the conditions regulating the duties of provincial officials, while Article 13 provides that the best of the budget of ordinary and extraordinary receipts and payments as well as the budget of each Department and Vilayet shall be published at the beginning of each official year.

14. After the revision of the existing laws and regulations relative to the organisation and duties of the ministries and vilayets, bills, for the alteration of said laws and regulations, according to the present requirements, shall be drafted, with a view to their being submitted to the Chamber of Deputies which is to meet shortly.

15. The conditions of the army shall be advanced, and the weapons and equipment improved.

A later edict carries the Governmental programme still further. All laws and regulations incompatible with the new régime are to be amended, all departments of Government, naval, military, judicial, and administrative, are to be reorganised. The right of property is consolidated, and non-Mussulmans for the future will be eligible for military service and admitted to the military colleges. The commercial treaties are to be renewed, but it is intended to secure, with the assent of the Powers, the abolition of the Capitulations, and to demonstrate, by winning the confidence of foreigners and maintaining cordial relations with the Powers, that the necessity for such privileges no longer exists.

With the dispersion of the old camarilla the immediate objective of the Young Turks had been secured, and it is necessary to pass now from our consideration of the part which they have played to a study of the changes to which a revival of the Ottoman Empire may give rise. As to what the future will disclose, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that, if constitutional government in a form suited to the capacities of the people can be established, the position of Turkey among the Powers and international relations with the Porte will be entirely transformed. Necessarily substantial modifications will have to be introduced into the Near Eastern policy of the various Chancelleries. For the better part of a century Europe has been contemplating the ultimate extinction of the Turk in Europe. Neither in Vienna nor St. Petersburg, assuredly not in Berlin, nor in any of the minor capitals, has there been any doubt of the Empire's inevitable dissolution. Yet, when the idea of supporting the Turkish Empire by external pressure for the benefit of the various races inhabiting the Ottoman dominions has dropped from its foremost place in the programme of the European Concert, a new era dawns, instinctive with vitality, and of a vigour sufficient to banish the old signs of decay.

If the change is to the advantage of Turkey, it will be heralded none the less with undisguised impatience by those who had already staked off their respective areas for occupation. Fortunately Great Britain has never been included among those heirs who ravened at the bedside of a now convalescent Power, and if at one time Mid-Victorian statesmen reaped the enmity of the Sultan, we would now appear to enjoy the confidence of the new school of Turkish statesmen in a marked degree. The change is welcome-how welcome only those can appreciate who have been in a position to realise for themselves the decline that has taken place in British prestige in Turkey in the last generation. Happily there is no middle course to be pursued; and just as we should support the Shah as the dominating factor in the

Persian situation, so should the British Government support the Turkish Constitution as the most likely solution of the Eastern question. Sir Edward Grey has at this moment what must prove the opportunity of his life, and if he permits it to pass by in allowing the new Parliament to waste its energies in a struggle for bare existence with the Sultan and his reactionary supporters, it were better that we took no further part in the affairs of the Near East.

It must not be thought that the new situation in Turkey prefaces a period of international intervention-nor that it is without application to India and Egypt. While there can be no stability without a benevolent guarantee, the provision of opportunity for the Young Turks to put their house thoroughly in order should be a matter of international obligation. In the interval the European Powers might do worse than reflect upon the proposals which Midhat put forward in 1876 and Lord Derby, to his lasting discredit, declined. At the same time the downfall of despotism in Turkey is one thing, and the installation of an inexperienced parliament founded upon irresponsible public opinion another, as the situation in Teheran has disclosed. But the mistakes which the Mejliss made will hardly be repeated in Constantinople, if the behaviour of the First Turkish Parliament affords any index to the proceedings of this one. The situation rests with the Moslem element, however, and if the present racial amity continues we may congratulate ourselves that a return to constitutionalism in Turkey has put an end to the viciousness which so long has described the Porte. In this Germany will suffer more than any other Power, for the reformers have swept away the satellites which worked her will.

If many rogues have gone and many German decorations are thereby wasted, it is to be hoped that we, in our turn, will not commit the mistake of withholding assistance. Naturally at such a moment jealousy and distrust of the foreigner will be widely felt, but disinterested offers of financial help may bridge many of the difficulties against which British interests have had to contend. The suggestion is necessary, as the good offices of the Deutsche Bank already have been placed at the disposal of the Constitutional leaders. British interests, however, can ill afford to lose so profitable an opportunity, even if the situation is impressed with political more than commercial significance, and we await with confidence, therefore, the adoption of those measures which will re-establish British prestige in the Levant on a firmer basis than has ever previously been known.

ANGUS HAMILTON.

TOLSTOY AND THE TOLSTOYANS.

AN international movement has been started for the purpose of paying solemn collective homage to Count Tolstoy-as much homage as he can be induced to accept-on his attainment of his eightieth birthday. And the question naturally arises: Why?

It is not a captious question, but the bald, unembellished statement of a problem. It implies no criticism of Tolstoy's eminence as a novelist, for it is not in the capacity of novelist that it is proposed to do him reverence. He stands before the world at the present time as a teacher-as that and nothing else, unless it be as a pattern and example of the way to live. The merits of his novels have only an indirect bearing upon his reputation. They gained him his public, but they do not contain his message. At the most they only foreshadow it, as we are taught that the Old Testament foreshadows the New. And, by common consent, the message is "the thing." Tolstoy says so, and the Tolstoyans agree with him. The novels are only important to them in so far as they lead up to the message, which is mainly propounded in tracts. The following of Tolstoy is for them not a literary enthusiasm, but a religion. They have evolved, as it were, from admirers to worshippers.

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A typical instance of the evolution may be found in the case of Mr. Ernest Howard Crosby, the chief of the American disciples. When Mr. Crosby read Anna Karenina, he was " duly impressed by it"-and that was all. It was when he read the tract On Vicious Pleasures that the change of heart began. The perusal of this work caused him to "stop smoking for three or four days"-a first step in asceticism which, he says, cost him a good deal. He next bought the tract On Life, and, having studied it, was impelled to a further act of self-denial. Feeling that he had risen to a loftier plane," he went out into the garden and gave half a piastre to a small boy who was playing there. It was, we gather, his first experiment in philanthropy. "No act of mine," he writes, "had ever given me so much pleasure"; and thereafter there was no looking back. Mr. Crosby purchased all the other tracts as they appeared, and went on from grace to grace until he finally wrote the work on Tolstoy and his Message, which was published by the Simple Life Press in 1903. He had come to regard Tolstoy, that is to say, not as an artist, but as a teacher; and that is the general note of the Tolstoyans.

It would be a most natural and proper note for them to strike

if they really believed in the teaching. But they do not believe in it-that is the weak point in their position. Some of them believe more than others; but nobody-or nobody who countsbelieves the whole of it. The only consistent and thorough-going Tolstoyans are those French conscripts who now and again incur disciplinary punishments by refusing to practise at the rifle ranges, and who figure before the world as dupes rather than as disciples. The professional exponents of the doctrine are always hedging, and qualifying, explaining some dogmas away, and making excuses for others. Even Mr. Crosby, whose enthusiasm is exuberant, and who writes that "the world has never looked to me quite as it used to" since the day when he gave away half a piastre under Tolstoyan influences, expounds after that halting fashion. He criticises the method by which Tolstoy arrives at his conclusions, and he criticises the conclusions when arrived at. He does it quite nicely, like a sick nurse arguing with an eccentric mental patient. Perhaps he could hardly do otherwise, seeing that the methods are obviously unsound, and some at least of the conclusions are obviously absurd. But the fact remains that, if Mr. Crosby be taken as a typical Tolstoyan, then we are entitled to define Tolstoyans as "people who do not quite agree with Tolstoy."

Tolstoyans may reply, perhaps, that they have as much right to read their own meaning into the sayings of Tolstoy as Christians have to read their own meaning into the sayings of Christ; but the analogy is not fair. The sayings of Christ come to us only at second or third hand, in a language different from that in which they were delivered. They may have been incorrectly reported; their significance may be conditioned by local and special circumstances which we do not fully understand. The critics have a legitimate field for conjecture and speculation. It is perfectly natural that they should fail to agree in their answers to the question: What is Christianity?-perfectly natural that the Bishop of London and the Reverend R. J. Campbell, for instance, should both contend that Christ meant what they mean, though their respective meanings are as the poles apart. The problem is one from which the personal equation cannot be eliminated. In the interpretation of Tolstoy, however, the personality of the interpreter has no part to play. Tolstoy himself is there to explain, and he spends most of his time in explaining.

He explains, it is true, that his doctrine is a kind of Christianity; and the explanation has been rather widely accepted. That view of his teaching was indubitably at the back of the roar of indignation that arose when the heads of the Greek Church