For centuries from the first appearance of the Osmanlis in north-west Asia Minor down to the reign of Abdul Hamid, the Empire maintained itself, with alternate bouts of vigour and relapses, on the general principle of drawing its strength from its subject peoples.  Internally, from whatever standpoint we view it, whether educational, economic, or industrial, it has had the worst record of any domination known to history.  Rich in mineral wealth, possessed of lands that were once the granary of the world, watered by amazing rivers, and with its strategic position on the Mediterranean that holds the master-key of the Black Sea in its hands, it has remained the most barbaric and least progressive of all states.  Its roads and means of communication remained up till the last quarter of the nineteenth century much as they had been in the days of Osman; except along an insignificant strip of sea-coast railways were non-existent; it was bankrupt in finance and in morals, and did not contain a single seed that might ripen into progress or civilisation.  Mesopotamia was once the most fertile of all lands, capable of supporting not itself alone, but half the civilised world:  nowadays, under the stewardship of the Turk, it has been suffered to become a desert for the greater part of the year and an impracticable swamp for the remainder.  Where great cities flourished, where once was reared the pride of Babylon and of Nineveh, there huddle the squalid huts of fever-stricken peasants, scarce able to gain their half-starved living from the soil that once supported in luxury and pomp the grandeur of metropolitan cities.  The ancient barrages, the canals, the systems of irrigation were all allowed to silt up and become useless; and at the end of the nineteenth century you would not find in all Mesopotamia an agricultural implement that was in any way superior to the ploughs and the flails of more than two thousand years ago.  But so long as there was a palace-guard about the gates to secure the safety of the Sultan and his corrupt military oligarchy, so long as there were houris to divert their leisure, tribute of youths to swell their armies, and taxes wrung from starving subjects to maintain their pomp, there was not one of those who held the reins of government who cared the flick of an eyelash for the needs of the nations on whom the Empire rested, for the cultivation of its soil that would yield a hundredfold to the skilled husbandman, or for the exploitation and development of its internal wealth.  While there was left in the emaciated carcase of the Turkish Empire enough live tissue for the cancerous Government to grow fat on, it gave not one thought to the welfare of all those races on whom it had fastened itself.  Province after province of its European dominions might be lost to it, but the Balance of Power still kept the Sultan on his throne, and left the peoples of Asia Minor and Syria at his mercy.  They were largely of alien religion and of alien tongue, and their individual weakness was his strength.  Neglect, and the decay consequent on neglect, was the lot of all who languished under that abominable despotism.