did much to spread the secret society craze, found no more fertile element to work upon than the yeasty mentality of the War Academy and the Military College of Medicine in Constantinople. So a secret political society which called itself the Society of Liberty was formed among the students at the War Academy and a similar society, the Society of Progress, was launched across the Bosphorus at the Military College of Medicine. But both were mere seeds sprouting underground in the rich and rotting soil of the capital. The country itself, outside the capital, was still a primitive Eastern land ruled by any man who proved himself strong enough to take it.
There were some 600,000 square miles in the old Ottoman Empire when Abdul Hamid came to the Throne. It was a compact area, lying at the junction of three continents. On the west, it ran deeply into the Balkans in Europe; on the east, it extended into Trans-Caucasia and down the frontier of Old Persia in Asia; on the south, it followed the Arabian coast of the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean and crossed to the African coast to include a waning sovereignty over Egypt. In the Balkans and Asia Minor, it consisted of a mountainous massif tilting up to the high plateau of Trans-Caucasia, its slopes dotted with isolated villages quite out of effective touch with any Government which might exist in Constantinople. Only the larger villages had a gendarmerie post, fewer still had a telegraph key to connect them with the provincial capital and throughout most of the country such Western contrivances as railroads were wholly unknown. With the country's administration rigidly centralized in
