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continually at the mercy of his Vizier or Prime Minister,
who in wealth and influence has often been superior to the
ruler himself. The Government was administered through
a group of six ministers of whom the Grand Vizier was the
chief. If these administrators were corrupt — which has
happened often in the past — it was possible to remove
them only by a cabinet crisis, which involved intrigue and
a display of force, resulting in the imprisonment and death
of the ministers and the sequestration of their property.
A systematic plan for the administration of public affairs
had never been evolved; nor did the methods employed in
the management of matters of state attain any high degree
of efficiency or intelligence. The court of the Sultan had
always been a center of great corruption and the ruler him-
self a legitinpate object of prey for the unscrupulous. No-
thing could be accomplished without a resort to intrigue and
bribery, or to an occasional display of force in the shape of
cruel and inhuman punishments of rebellious Kaids, or of
other officials who had betrayed or defied or disobeyed the
monarch. Every public service had its price or its financial
reward, and the most trusted officials of the empire did not
hesitate to rob their master shamelessly on every hand, as in
the case of Abd-el-Aziz, and in the end to betray him when
nothing more was to be gained by serving him. The sultans
for the most part were as skillful in the methods of deceit and
intrigue as their subjects. For thirty years — 1880 to 1910
— they successfully evaded all the efforts of the European
states to induce them to introduce effective governmental
reforms, to abolish cruel customs and punishments, and to
provide some adequate system of protection for life and
property. So corruption in private and public life, slavery
and the slave trade, oppression and tyranny in high places
and in the tribal communities, went on unabated.
The Sultan is the religious head — the Defender of the
