Abdul-Hamid

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 31, 3 August 1905, Page 1

Abdul - Hamid

Abdul-Hanihd 11., Commander of the Faithful, sits upon a ricnety and palsied throne. He has sat there since 187b — holding on to it with the desperate grip with which a British tourist clings to an liish jauntingcar that is knocking sparks out of a road crowded with hairpin curves. Lost week one of Abdul's faithful subjects endeavored to get him ready for the coroner. But the post-moi tern on the Grand Tuik did not come off. Some things, however, did come off — to wit, t-iie heads of sundry leal or si specteJ conspirators For treachery surrounds the Ihione in Stamboul as well as in Belgrade. To those who wear the thorny diadem of the House of Ot'mian the only good conspirators are dead cons; irat' >is And Alulul-llairid takes no chances. His father, Al iliiKVe hid. had a troubled but promising iei»n Then came his uncle, the spendthrift AUdul-Azi/, lie ran Turkey into insolvency m 1875. In the following 3 ear he was deposed The sequel is briefly told in Lane-Poole's ' Stoiy of Turkey ' • Al>dul-A/i/. was ' found dead ' Murad \.— Ahdul-llamid's elder brother — slepped uito the uii\«l-toed boots of the dead Sultan But, as the Turks say, ' Allah was with him '—a euphemistic wav of intimating that Murad was mad. lake Kipling- s match, he went off his head. Some say'that it was what he saw oi knew of the exit of Aziz fLom this a ale of tears ' That, left him for iver Wid a poor, puzzled poll '— like Bat of the Biidn;e in Alficd Percival Graves' Book of Ballads. But whatever may have 'left the proper man so,' Murad wore his unconscioas crown for only three short months Then he was deposed as an imbecile, and Abdul-Hamid mounted, in his stead, the motheaten remnants of the throne that once bore Soliman the Magnificent I-ncasy must lie the head that wears the circlet of Othman to-day,, for there are, we ween, worse visions than airy daggers about Abdul-Hamid's pillow o' nights The ghosts of the murdered Bulgarians and Armenians must often flit before his mind's eye and ' abuse his curtained sleep.' ' Nature's .soft nurse,' that (as Shakespeare saith) ' lieth in smoky cribs,' must often he a stranger to Abdul-llamid's 'canopies of costly state ' when half the world is drawing ' the sweet infant breath of gentle sleep.'