The weakness of the Empire from a military point of view is, that it is dependent wholly on its command of the sea, a position which enables it to mass what troops it has rapidly on the points required, but which even a second-rate Mediterranean power could wrest from it.  Its communication cut by a naval blockade, the Empire would almost without further action be dissolved.  Whatever loyalty the Sultan may have lately achieved outside his dominions, there is not only no spirit of national resistance in Asia Minor itself, but the provinces, even the most Mussulman, would hail an invading army as a welcome deliverer from him.  Left to themselves they would abandon without compunction the Sultan’s cause, and the next war of an European state with Turkey will not only be her last, but it will in all likelihood hardly be fought out by her.

Nor do I conceive that the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the annexation of its Turkish provinces would be a mere political loss of so much territory to Islam.  It would involve moral consequences far greater than this for the whole Mussulman world of North-Western Asia.  I have the authority of the most enlightened of modern Asiatic statesmen in support of my opinion that it would be the certain deathblow of Mohammedanism as a permanent religious faith in all the lands west of the Caspian, and that even among the Tartar races of the far East, the Sunite Mussulmans of Siberia and the Khanates, and as far as the Great Wall of China, it would be a shock from which Sunism in its present shape would with difficulty recover.  What has hitherto supported the religious constancy of orthodox believers in those lands, formerly Ottoman, which have become subject to Russia, has been throughout the consciousness that there was still upon the Russian border a great militant body of men of their own faith, ruled by its acknowledged spiritual head.

The centre of their religious pride has been Constantinople, where the Sultan and Caliph has sat enthroned upon the Bosphorus, commanding the two worlds of Europe and Asia, and securing to them communication with the holy places of their devotion and the living body of true believers.  Their self-respect has been maintained by this feeling, and with it fidelity to their traditions.  Moreover, the school of St. Sophia has been a fountain-head of religious knowledge, the university at which the Ulema of Kazan and Tiflis and Astrachan have received their spiritual education; while at all times religious personages from Constantinople have travelled among them, keeping alive the recollection of their lost allegiance.  On this basis their faith has retained what it has of loyalty in spite of the political Russianising they have undergone; but with their political centre destroyed, they would be as sheep without a shepherd, scattered in little groups here and there among a growing Christian population, and shut out from the fold of their belief.