FOREWORD
This book was not written in order to catch popular favor at this time of revolution in the Ottoman empire. All except the concluding chapter was prepared some time before the 24th of July, 1908, and the entire work was at that time nearly ready for the press. Much of the material had been used in the Hyde Lecture Course at Andover Seminary and in the Alden Lecture Course at the Chicago Theological Seminary. The chapter, “Turkey and the Constitution,” was written since the overthrow of the old régime, and appeared as an article in The Outlook in September, 1908. The book does not pretend to be an exhaustive study of the Turkish empire and its problems. Such a work would necessarily be encyclopedic in its size and scope.
The purpose from the beginning has been briefly and clearly to set forth the various historical, religious, racial, material, and national questions having so vital a bearing upon all Turkish matters, and which now reveal the forces that have had so much to do in changing Turkey from an absolute monarchy into a constitutional and representative government. Reformations have never come by accident, and this moral and political revolution in Turkey, the most sweeping of all, is no exception. To one who traces the entrance and development in the Ottoman empire during the last century, of reformative ideas in the religious, intellectual, and social life of the people, the present almost bloodless revolution presents no mysteries. It is but the fruit of the seeds of intelligence, of righteousness, and of holy ambition, sown in good soil and now bearing fruit after their kind.
Boston, December, 1908.