What of the second element?  The religious prestige of the Ottoman power as the repository of caliphial authority and trustee for Islam in the Holy Land of Arabia, is an asset almost impossible to estimate.  Would a death struggle of the Osmanlis in Europe rouse the Sunni world?  Would the Moslems of India, Afghanistan, Turkestan, China, and Malaya take up arms for the Ottoman sultan as caliph?  Nothing but the event will prove that they would.  Jehad, or Holy War, is an obsolescent weapon difficult and dangerous for Young Turks to wield:  difficult because their own Islamic sincerity is suspect and they are taking the field now as clients of giaur peoples; dangerous because the Ottoman nation itself includes numerous Christian elements, indispensable to its economy.

Undoubtedly, however, the Ottoman sultanate can count on its religious prestige appealing widely, overriding counteracting sentiments, and, if it rouses to action, rousing the most dangerous temper of all.  It is futile to ignore the caliph because he is not of the Koreish, and owes his dignity to a sixteenth-century transfer.  These facts are either unknown or not borne in mind by half the Sunnites on whom he might call, and weigh far less with the other half than his hereditary dominion over the Holy Cities, sanctioned by the prescription of nearly four centuries.

One thing can be foretold with certainty.  The religious prestige of an Ottoman sultan, who had definitely lost control of the Holy Places, would cease as quickly and utterly as the secular prestige of one who had evacuated Constantinople:  and since the loss of the latter would probably precipitate an Arab revolt, and cut off the Hejaz, the religious element in Ottoman prestige may be said to depend on Constantinople as much as the secular.  All the more reason why the Committee of Union and Progress should not have accepted that well-meant advice of European publicists!  A successful revolt of the Arab-speaking provinces would indeed sound the death-knell of the Ottoman Empire.  No other event would be so immediately and surely catastrophic.

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The third element in Osmanli prestige, inherent qualities of the Osmanli ‘Turk’ himself, will be admitted by every one who knows him and his history.  To say that he has the ‘will to power’ is not, however, to say that he has an aptitude for government.  He wishes to govern others; his will to do so imposes itself on peoples who have not the same will; they give way to him and he governs them indifferently, though often better than they can govern themselves.  For example, bad as, according to our standards, Turkish government is, native Arab government, when not in tutelage to Europeans, has generally proved itself worse, when tried in the Ottoman area in modern times.  Where it is of a purely Bedawi barbaric type, as in the emirates of central Arabia, it does well enough; but if the population